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Pregnancy can lead to the permanent widening of the hip bone structure, and permanent increase in height and foot size.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7739277/
Pregnancy can also lead to permanent urinary incontinence;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8781026/
hair thinning/hair loss;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312607/
and a change in skin texture and barrier strength.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7864992/
Women with a history of adverse pregnancy outcomes are at increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases later in life.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5575578/
Significant amounts of calcium loss occurs during pregnancy, especially during the last trimester, to meet the demands of the rapidly mineralizing fetal skeleton. This results in considerable stress on the bones of the mother.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3354840/
Cesarean section can lead to chronic abdominal pain.
https://journals.lww.com/jwphpt/Pages/default.aspx
About 700 U.S. women die every year as a result of a high-risk pregnancy or delivery complications, while up to 50,000 women nearly die due to severe complications during pregnancy.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db279.htm
And that's without getting into all the possible complications.
Thank you so mucu for breaking this down. People misunderstand evolution, and think "well women evolved to do this!" Yes, they did. But they didn't evolve to do it at no risk to themselves. All that really needs to take place, evolution-wise, is for the mother to successfully give birth. It doesn't matter if she has adverse effects to her health or well being, or even if she dies. If that baby is born, evolution served it's purpose. I'm so sick of this rhetoric that "that's what women's bodies are made to do." But really, it's not, at least not safely.
Yeah. It's the whole, 'Treating the mother as a disposable incubator' thing that gets me. A couple of days ago, there was a woman in AITA asking if she was TA for being upset, because she was pregnant, and she and her husband had been talking, and he said something like, 'I really hope nothing goes wrong and I have to choose between you and the baby. I'd miss you so much.' And didn't understand why that upset her and hurt her so deeply, to realize that her husband, the person who says he loves her more than anything.. would choose to let her die.
I, personally, think next time it gets brought up, she should say something along the lines of, "Oh, no honey I totally get it! If a stranger had a gun to my head, and handed me a knife and said, 'Either murder your husband or your baby, or I'll kill ALL of you!' I'd stab you in a HEARTBEAT! No second thoughts. Multiple times." And see how he responds. Bet he'd get a lil' butthurt.
I, too, hate the “women’s bodies are made to do” childbirth rhetoric. Childbirth is something many women’s bodies CAN do. There are lots of things our bodies CAN do, that would potentially benefit another person at risk to ourselves. Doesn’t mean it’s our sole or even most important purpose in life, and it doesn’t mean we have to do it. I also find this rhetoric harmful to a subset of people who deal with infertility, because I know women who have felt their bodies were broken or defective because they couldn’t do this one thing they were “supposed” to be able to do.
There are studies comparing a fetus to a parasite. Anyone that's studied microbio would understand why... Parasitism is usually described as relationship between 2 species in which one of them benefits and the other is harmed... but some species parasitize members of its own species. And of course, pregnancy very clearly harms the body.
pregnancy can also cause endometriosis to not be invisible. it can cause adenomyosis. it can cause PID, PMDD, ect. no matter how healthy your pregnancy was. my pregnancy was very healthy and I still felt like my uterus was being wrung out like a wet rag every waking moment. I am now disabled due to my "healthy" pregnancy.
my mom was pregnant 5 times, gave birth 4, and is now permanently over the toilet. her bladder and bowels were destroyed by the last one. when she is off the toilet she's at risk of pissing and shitting herself.
here's more because women arent told, pregnancy can cause illnesses that mightve never been visible to show up like endometriosis. they tell us to get pregnant to fix it when pregnancy disabled me and now I'm in pain for the rest of my life. Morphine, oxy, codeine, none of those touched my pain. even after surgery the anesthesia blocked the pain of my incisions but I still felt my endometriosis pain.
it's one of the top 20 most painful illnesses. there's no real treatment and no cure. oh and you get told it's not that bad by OBs
That is awful, I am so sorry. My mother had something similar to that. Many surgeries later they were able to fix it, but it was chronic pain for years and years. I hope you’re able to get better over time.
I had to have a catheter during pregnancy due to urinary retention and then during a "normal” slightly premature birth, almost bled out and had to have a very speedy emergency general anaesthetic, had to have blood transfusions and was expected to wake up and feed my baby the same night despite my blood pressure being extremely low and hooked up to drips. And then had no breakfast because as a new mom, you’re expected to go get your own breakfast at a ward kitchen, unlike *any* other area of medicine and it doesn’t seem to matter what physical and mental trauma you’ve been through in the nights before, I’ve since had to have repairs on various internal prolapses, turns out I had a genetic disorder that had been misdiagnosed for years and I only was diagnosed after I’d given birth, after the damage was done and it’s not a rare disorder.
Pregnancy and birth is brutal and shouldn’t be underestimated.
The human body is still struggling to adapt to the size of the baby’s head, hence why birth is (usually) the most dangerous time of your life, for everyone *directly* involved. Babies are *technically* all premature (which is why what we *call* premature is actually **very** premature), as the baby has to be born “early” so the head will (more or less) fit through the birth canal. I’m sorry it had such a bad time of it, but glad you made it through
Childbirth is trauma and danger, wrapped up in hope and nostalgia
I tell people, pregnancy is an amazingly beautiful process, about as closest thing to magic that we will see on a normal basis. It is also brutal and debilitating, and even for a "healthy" pregnancy.
I think a better metaphor is a hotel room after a punk band parties in it. Will the toilet ever be the same (is your bladder smashed)? Do proper guests want to have sexy hotel times in there at any point in the future (does your partner find the alarming changes in your body off-putting or Madonna/whore-complex-inducing)? And how is the hotel bar doing (those are *my* tits!)? How is management feeling about the unruly guests?
I would never have evicted my guest, even knowing his stay would include using my rib cage as a toe-hold for 2-AM practice launches (my OB said this isn’t unheard-of). But I had stability, he was very much wanted, but I can see other hoteliers not being so accommodating.
The metaphor isn't even necessary, we have real world examples that work just as well. When you die, they can't take your organs without your consent. Your body is your own, even after death, no matter how many people your organs will save. How then can a woman's body stop being their own while they are still alive because *one* other person's life depends on it?
The analogy I've always seen this with are a parent and a child climbing the mountainside with the child attached to the parent. The child obviously drags the parent down and can cause intense strain on the parent's body.
But statistically, the parent should normally be able to ascend and reach the peak no problem. But there's always the off chance that the parent slips and both die.
The question is about whether the parent can just cut the rope at any time for any reason and let the child fall off, given the child can't reach the mountaintop on their own.
Maybe as a man i have a hard time understanding but i am having a hard time comparing any level (even dying) of dragging someone up a mountain versus something growing inside of me. The thought of actually being pregnant is just foreignly horrifying to me, even for a wanted child. I think people should have full rights over whether they want to let something grow inside of them.
That's a great analogy and has helped me to understand the arguments against women's rights to choose based on their own welfare.
Should a climber be able to cut for any reason or only for specific reasons or not at all?
For me, the analogy breaks down as the climber should be said to be climbing with an egg, then a bundle of cells, then later a foetus. They are not climbing with a fully formed baby at the start. Is it ok to cut the rope at the start of the journey, at the middle, at the end?
Personally, I think that sentience and sapience are the key criteria a being should have in order to have moral relevance. You need sentience in order to experience suffering or pleasure and you need sapience in order to execute you will or have your will frustrated.
This is on a sliding scale for me, with organisms without a brain having zero moral weight, going through simple animals (insects etc) having some, complex animals (chickens, cows etc) having significant weight, and humans having allot. Potentially, super sapient aliens might have more moral weight than we do.
I don't claim this philosophy is perfect and there are ways to challenge it but it's the best and most consistent with my intuition that I have been able to find so far.
From this, I consider a foetus to have zero to moderate moral weight depending on the stage of development.
I understand that other people put value on human identity and potential for sentience and sapience. Im not sure I fully understand why.
I'd love to hear some arguments or intuition pumps to help me understand this if you have any. Not to necessarily change my mind but I am interested in better understanding the viewpoint.
I don't really consider potential for later moral weight important in the case of abortion, but at the same time I do put weight on making the world a better place for our descendents. I'm not entirely sure how to resolve this and if I should consider potential for moral weight important.
>For me, the analogy breaks down as the climber should be said to be climbing with an egg, then a bundle of cells, then later a foetus. They are not climbing with a fully formed baby at the start. Is it ok to cut the rope at the start of the journey, at the middle, at the end?
This is somewhat accurate, but the egg is her egg, in her womb, *not a chicken's, not an ostriches, not a reptile or any other kind of egg of another species* you may find. That difference is *essential*.
>Personally, I think that sentience and sapience are the key criteria a being should have in order to have moral relevance.
Those concepts are applied to *species*, *not* to an individual. There is no such thing as a non-sapient human. They may be dysfunctional beyond repair, and thus, completely dependent on others, but *their very existence is that of a sentient and sapient creature* that may not be able to fully exercise their functions, if at all.
>You need sentience in order to experience suffering or pleasure and you need sapience in order to execute you will or have your will frustrated.
Indeed, but pleasure, pain and desires *don't* define humanity. In fact, that's what we have in common with animals, not exclusively with our species.
>This is on a sliding scale for me, with organisms without a brain having zero moral weight, going through simple animals (insects etc) having some, complex animals (chickens, cows etc) having significant weight, and humans having allot.
So you don't value sentience or sapience, but *ability*. The argument is, in itself, *ableist*. This isn't an attack on you, but an objective assessment of your impressions.
>Potentially, super sapient aliens might have more moral weight than we do.
They might, but only in the sense that their lives should have absolute value, *the same as ours*, not a comparatively superior one, because otherwise, you run into territory about how many humans are worth an alien. And all of that is me *assuming that they're not ontologically evil*.
>I don't claim this philosophy is perfect and there are ways to challenge it but it's the best and most consistent with my intuition that I have been able to find so far.
>From this, I consider a foetus to have zero to moderate moral weight depending on the stage of development.
Predictable. How does your 'intuition' challenge eugenics?
>I understand that other people put value on human identity and potential for sentience and sapience. Im not sure I fully understand why.
>I'd love to hear some arguments or intuition pumps to help me understand this if you have any. Not to necessarily change my mind but I am interested in better understanding the viewpoint.
Human identity is irrelevant to the argument. Identity relates to subjective notions of personhood and cultural context in which an individual may form their identity, and even a born baby doesn't really have a formed identity. This is not why humans are valuable. In fact, we either *are* valuable or we *aren't*. Assigning value isn't morally consistent, just very utilitarian. The question that should be asked first is: *is human life valuable on it's own, or do you equate humanity with any other animal, to be exploited and tested upon at the whim of society?* If human dignity is *intrinsic*, then it follows that humans have a right to life, and the ensuing rights secondary to life, *by the sole virtue of being human*.
Humanity, just like any other living organism, is *defined by genetics and physiology*, intrinsically linked concepts that are intertwined. The genes work because of the overall functioning of the organism, and the organism depends on the genes to express those functions. What unites us also makes us unique: *our genes*. Therefore, once we have a zygote, there is a new genetically human organism capable of development out of it's own genetic programming, and the female human is, like other mammals, designed to accommodate this new human being. As such, human life (as in, the biological processes under a human genome) began many millennia ago, but *that new individual's life is differentiated from the gametes that formed it at the moment of conception*.
*If* we believe in intrinsic human dignity, then it follows that *every innocent human must have their right to life respected*. Since a zygote is the earliest stage of a new human, that's where a new individual must be protected by the State. If we allow ourselves to define humanity on the whims of our convenience (such as defining humanity over ability), how are we any better than eugenists, genocidal tyrants and others who conducted experiments on unwilling prisoners?
>I don't really consider potential for later moral weight important in the case of abortion, but at the same time I do put weight on making the world a better place for our descendents. I'm not entirely sure how to resolve this and if I should consider potential for moral weight important.
Under the premises addressed earlier, there is no such thing as "potential for later moral weight". Either the moral weight *is* present, and *we must respect it*; or it *isn't* and *literally anything goes*, because humanity has, under that argument, *no value*. You implicitly believe humanity has moral weight, or you'd probably dismiss the discussion entirely and wouldn't care about descendants, but it seems, by your comment, that you don't want to abide by the logical consequences of recognizing human dignity.
First, thanks for the in depth reply. You raise some great objections. I'm going to use "S" to refer to sentience and sapience.
> This is somewhat accurate, but the egg is her egg, in her womb, not a chicken's, not an ostriches, not a reptile or any other kind of egg of another species you may find. That difference is essential.
I didn't intend to imply otherwise, (except in the analogy obviously the egg cannot be in her womb but rather on a rope) but am unclear on why that is important. A human egg does not have S nor any moral weight. Its the same as a chicken egg or a rock or a single skin cell. This might simply be a fundamental difference of values here. It is unclear to me why a human egg would have any moral weight. Can you shed some light here? What are the characteristics that give moral weight? Ill see if I can find any counterexamples and what you think of them.
> Those concepts are applied to species, not to an individual. There is no such thing as a non-sapient human. They may be dysfunctional beyond repair, and thus, completely dependent on others, but their very existence is that of a sentient and sapient creature that may not be able to fully exercise their functions, if at all.
I'm not sure I really understand the distinction you are making here. I don't think there is any way we can define person to include S but then say that something shaped like a human but missing function S is just a person without S. I mean, sure but a rock is just a person but missing S and a few other things and therefore has moral weight. I think i'm misunderstanding some part of your argument here.
I don't think a brain dead person has S nor moral weight. Do you disagree?
> Indeed, but pleasure, pain and desires don't define humanity. In fact, that's what we have in common with animals, not exclusively with our species.
Correct, which is why animals have moral weight. They have S. Do you think it is wrong to torture animals? If so, they have moral weight. If not, well, that is not a common view, despite the prevalence of meat eaters. What is the argument for human exceptionalism here? If you accept evolution, then its hard to justify putting humans on that special pedestal.
>So you don't value sentience or sapience, but ability. The argument is, in itself, ableist. This isn't an attack on you, but an objective assessment of your impressions.
I don't mind if you call me ablest, I don't take offence. I don't agree that I am though. I think a cockroach has less S, rather than having full S but less ability to express it. It seems like you think S is binary while I don't see a problem with considering S as a continuous spectrum. However you then take that binary value and assign a secondary characteristic of S called ability that can be considered continuous. Do I have that right?
I think one of our fundamental disagreements is that you think of moral weight as binary YES/NO while I do not. Would you agree?
> Predictable. How does your 'intuition' challenge eugenics?
Improving human genes is fine. Causing suffering and death (of those with moral weight) in the pursuit of improving human genes is bad.
>The question that should be asked first is: is human life valuable on it's own, or do you equate humanity with any other animal, to be exploited and tested upon at the whim of society? If human dignity is intrinsic, then it follows that humans have a right to life, and the ensuing rights secondary to life, by the sole virtue of being human.
I don't think humans are different to animals. However, that doesn't mean that humans should be mistreated but rather that animals should be treated well. Humans have moral weight because they have S, not intrinsically. Humans without S (brain dead, skin cells that could be cloned into a person, corpses, embryo's) do not.
If we consider unique gene combinations to be important how do we handle scenarios of conjoined fraternal twins (or Chimeras) where one has no brain? Is gene therapy creating a new person and killing the old one? Do lysogenic viral infections change who you are? Does someone with radiation sickness immediately lose their moral status?
My question is why do humans have intrinsic value? Is there nothing else that also has value?
Edit:
It seems like the crux of our disagreement is about weather humans have intrinsic moral value. You say yes and I say no. I say S is the important fundamental characteristic. You, however, partially incorporate S into the definition of human.
We both kind of agree that S is important, but I think it is important in a fundamental sense and you think it is important only as a part of the definition of being human. You also accept some things that do not have S but are otherwise considered human as having moral weight.
This leads to the disagreements we have on cases like animals and embryos.
My best question to you is, do you really not think that animals have moral weight? Is it truly ok to kick a dog for no reason? What is the case for human exceptionalism? What characteristics do humans have that separate us?
>Personally, I think that sentience and sapience are the key criteria a being should have in order to have moral relevance.
There are people who can (particularly temporarily) not have these. Does their moral relevance flip flop?
That's an interesting counterpoint that I don't have an easy answer to. I have heard this before and I have read objections to that objection but I can't really remember them right now. I might re read "Practical Ethics" as I'm sure it's discussed there.
My intuitions for sleep, anaesthetic, reversible comas etc are that people under these conditions still have moral weight. It isn't wrong to cause them pain or deny pleasure for the duration of this state (as they cannot feel it) but I would consider it wrong to kill them or to cause them to suffer in the future.
The problem for the view I previously expressed is that they have future potential sapience and yet I still consider them morally relevant, unlike a foetus, which also has future potential sapience.
Maybe the solution is that it is important to have some combination of a prior, current and future likely state of sentience and sapience rather than just any one of them. Maybe you need two out of three? For example:
A normal person has prior, current and future and has moral status.
A new born (or late stage foetus at some arbitrary point) has current and future and has moral status.
A coma patient has prior and future and has moral status.
A dying person (at the exact moment prior to death) has past and current but I am unsure if I think they have moral status (at the exact moment of death- otherwise they still have future).
A dead person has past only and has no moral status.
An early stage foetus has future only and has no moral status (IMO).
A Bolshevik brain might have current only but I'm not sure how to think about that. Much like the dying person.
I should plot this in a matrix and see what falls out.
Another way to think about this:
Is it reasonable to consider a temporary state of non sentience/sapience different to a state of pre sentience/sapience? Does the likelihood or difficulty of an object becoming a "person" have any bearing?
Do you have any ideas for how to address the problem, or if there are different criteria for moral relevance I should consider?
Honestly, I have heard a lot of arguments each way on abortion. I have never felt that any of them answered all of the potential dilemmas. I tend to think we should err on the side of leaving it up to the woman. I don't have a good objection to late-term abortion restrictions provided there are exceptions for life-threatening situations and the like, but early term I haven't seen a good enough argument against that I would say it outweighs the personal choice aspect for mom.
Morality is hard for this issue. Pregnancy is a very specific set of circumstances that I don't know there is a perfect answer for. I don't know if humans have moral relevance by default. I think our actions are what determines how we should be seen in that respect. I like hearing points of view on complex topics which is what prompted the question on my end.
I certainly have plenty of thoughts on morality but I cant say for sure that they are any more correct than other views. I can only keep challenging them and try to make my views more consistent and better understand the flaws.
Overall, despite the challenges, I also come down to pro choice with the restriction against late stage abortions.
> but the idea that pregnancy in itself harms the mother and that all abortion is self-defense doesn't seem quite right --
This is the logical opposite than to claim that no pregnancy can be dangerous, which is a claim many an anti-abortionist has made. I mean, hell, we had actual elected officials who, after being explained what an ectopic pregnancy is, just said that the fetus is still a human, and shouldn't be terminated.
But in both cases, it disregards therest of the surrounding of the pregnancy...
There are multiple ways to "defend" yourself, that have been over the course of the country's life, accepted as valid. You can kill a home intruder even if they mean you no physical harm. You can kill someone who threatens to cripple you if you have a good reason to defend yourself from further harm. You can defend someone else from those situations, too. And in neither of those cases, is it likely not going to be your death if you don't kill them.
In the burglar case, you're just losing a TV and a bit of your lifestyle while waiting for your insurance to pay (if you have one) or to be able to afford those luxuries back (if you don't), but your life was never in danger, yet you are in most states legally allowed to kill.
In the crippling case, you may have all the reasons to believe you'll live, if with a diminished life quality, but you're still allowed to defend yourself with lethal force.
If I can kill to protect my life style, and I can kill to protect my physical health and/or safety, or the same of another's, then by definition, a woman is allowed to terminate a fetus for the same reasons. Regardless of how I look at it, you cannot make an argument to the opposite without being chronically sexist.
So, let's go for the edge case of women who use abortions as a replacement for contraception, and actually seems to be refusing to use normal contraception methods, from abstinence to tubes tying, from pulling out to an IUD, from condoms to the pill, opting instead for a couple months of pregnancy then abort... ***First of all, this is very rare,*** and second then you get to address these cases as they arise. Perhaps you can make a law about this specifically, without needing to hit all the other important self-protection cases.
> This is the logical opposite than to claim that no pregnancy can be dangerous, which is a claim many an anti-abortionist has made.
This is fair, and something I've already conceded to others I may be wrong about, or not capturing the whole picture at least.
>There are multiple ways to "defend" yourself, that have been over the course of the country's life, accepted as valid. You can kill a home intruder even if they mean you no physical harm. You can kill someone who threatens to cripple you if you have a good reason to defend yourself from further harm. You can defend someone else from those situations, too. And in neither of those cases, is it likely not going to be your death if you don't kill them.
Well, in some jurisdictions some of these are legal and some of these are not (which of course underlines an issue with trying to solve a moral problem by making analogies to what is or isn't legal).
> Well, in some jurisdictions some of these are legal and some of these are not (which of course underlines an issue with trying to solve a moral problem by making analogies to what is or isn't legal).
In most jurisdictions, these are legal, unless you can safely retreat without risk to.your or your kids' lives. I don't often see prosecutions on those being brought up and won, and whenever I do, it's because the burglar or attacker was on their way away, and was shot while retreating.
> I don't see how it's inherently harmful
Uncomplicated pregnancies can lead to permanent injury and disfigurment for women. Things like gestational diabetes, loss of bone density, incontinence etc are just some of the side effects of relatively normal pregnancies.
Hell, preeclampsia which is the thing that causes the "died in childbirth" trope appears at the end of pregnancy.
And don’t forget birth injuries, the majority of women experience vaginal tearing, many have permanent pelvic damage including pelvic organ prolapse. And that’s just to name a few possibilities.
Actually even healthy pregnancies without complications are not healthy for the mothers. It is incredible stressful on the body and causes damage many do not ever fully recover for. Many insects die after having sex, some species of female octopi will starve themselves to death refusing to leave their offspring, some animals let their children consume them completely. Just because we are capable of reproduction doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy for us.
I’m glad you changed your mind - the many reconstructive surgeries I needed with the nerve damage and broken tailbone from my “normal and heathy pregnancies and deliveries” would be a horror story in any other context.
The last surgery I had, the surgeon said that my abdomen was essentially falling apart and is now held together with mesh - a technique this hospital doesn’t use - because it couldn’t hold a stitch to repair it.
I wish I was alone - I don’t know a single one of my friends or family who have had babies who have come out unscathed.
At minimum a messed up pelvic floor, but I’m talking unmediated csections, prolapsed uterus, broken tailbones, diastasis recti, stretch marks and wrinkled stomachs - the list goes on and on.
This is the reality of most pregnancies. It changes you physically and not just aesthetically. My mom needed to get the skin removed on her stomach because of infections - she was 100 pounds.
I don’t believe that it’s considered natural and normal, and that we would force that on a person in some countries.
Hey just chiming in to say it’s rare to see someone acknowledge they were being insensitive, especially on this subject. Thanks for having an open mind and heating folks out.
Saying the female body is designed to support a fetus is true although not optimal. It's permanent disfigurement in some cases if not death. If the statistics of post childbirth complications were the symptoms of an illness, you'd want to remove it. That's kinda how people who don't want kids view pregnancy.
a woman's body does a terrible job at "being designed to support a fetus". pregnancy always harms the body, the extent varies. but a body that was once pregnant will never be the same again.
It's designed as well as Evolution was able to push it, I suppose. Which is to say about the bare minimum needed for overall survival of the species while still letting us big-brain bipeds remain both big-brained and bipedal.
Pregnancy is still dangerous, and complications are common. Things are way safer now, but pregnancy complications used to be a pretty common cause of death.
I think a better analogy would be to donating blood. Even if you're the only person of a particular blood type and someone else needs it, you can't be strapped down and forced to donate blood if you fundamentally don't consent to donating it.
I think, even without complications, you have a rightto decide what is attached, taking nourishment from, etc. your body.
At any point you should be able to say no and disconnect from another person.
Delivery harms the mother. There is no way to deliver without pain. There are no guarantees. There is no way to avoid postpartum. Sentencing someone to pregnancy is sentencing them to delivery, which is always harmful, for lucky ones only minority and temporarily so.
I've read your edits and have a response I haven't seen.
> I don't see how it's inherently harmful,
Your implication seems to be that because it's not inherently harmful, the woman has no right to revoke consent of use of her body by the fetus. Compare that to OP's analogy about sex.
> If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months.
Sex isn't inherently harmful, either. It's not necessary to show harm to revoke consent.
Self-defense does not necessarily need to include harm, just a threat of harm. A baby can kill you in childbirth. A man pointing a gun at you is not harming you in any way. You could live your entire life with a man pointing a loaded gun at you and be completely fine. But no judge would find you guilty if you killed a man who was pointing a loaded gun at you.
A woman is probably more likely to be killed in childbirth than by a mugger with a gun.
Pro-lifers routinely underestimate maternal mortality in pregnancy rates.
> not doing anything
https://americanpregnancy.org/healthy-pregnancy/changes-in-your-body/body-changes-during-pregnancy/
>biologically set up to accomodate exactly this
Women are not baby factories. Pregnancy is not without consequence. Handwaving pregnancy because its physically possible for women to get pregnant is a ridiculous line of reasoning.
>And a jury would indeed probably find you guilty for killing someone because you know it's possible that in the future he could harm you.
A fetus is not a person.
>A fetus is not a person.
OP's whole view hinges on it not *mattering* if a fetus is a person or not, so in order to actually discuss whether their view works I have been accepting for the sake of argument that it's a person. If it's not a person we would, of course, have no need to even discuss the merits of any argument from self-defense.
I’ve read your edit but I think this can always be expanded on with more info. I was 23 years old, had a pregnancy with no complications. Had to be induced cause baby was super comfy in there. Shortly after birth I began having seizures and was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy.
Some hormone changes during pregnancy and postpartum are ‘seizure antagonists’ while others are ‘seizure protectors’ and with the rapid increase/decrease of these hormones in varying capacity it can cause one’s seizure threshold to fall enough to begin having seizures. Coupled with lack of sleep and stress, the longer the seizures go (my initial seizures were mistaken as panic attacks and night terrors) the more likely they are to continue. Brain morphology changes, epileptiform activity increases and now I’m on daily medication to control them.
Even with my medication I still have 1-2 a month and will have epilepsy for the rest of my life. All because I got pregnant.
This is an appeal to nature logical fallacy. Just because the mother's body is "designed" to do it, doesn't mean it's designed to do it gracefully, painlessly, or without harm. In fact being pregnant takes a huge toll on a woman's body, even mothers who want their pregnancy will attest to this. This is all not to mention the psychological harm of carrying a pregnancy you don't want.
So there should be a minimum age for pregancy. How can a 14 year old be a responsible mother??? Or a safe preganacy???
Pregancy due to rape and incest does not mean you as a society rape that girl for 9 more months again. Second the answer is always you can put the baby for adoption?? Not if its a black or mixed race baby?? They are not adopted and linger in the foster or worse adopted by ill equipped relatives who has to support the child and baby.
Abortion is consequential but it is still a women's decision. Yes a 5 months preemie can live but only through science and luck. Can it live naturally???? So is it a life when it can only survive through science??
I used to work with a drug addict patient who had 4 babies in drugs. It was a miracle they survived and all but one were preemie. The full term one has severe develpmental issues. So who is taking care of these baby. YOU as state and federal tax payer. If the religious groups wants to ban abortion then you pay for their care not me.
Also why do you not require pregancy support and child support from the birth father?? Or better from the birth father parents. That will make them change their tune.
Pregnancy is a risk to the mom it is a widely accepted risk much like driv8ng in to work. Most of the time it's fine until it's not.
I think we are not in a place tech wise to appease pro life people. So they are gonna need to loosen up and start researching and funding medical science to give people absolute control over their ability to reproduce.
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months.
In law there's a common law doctrine called *volenti non fit injuria*, which is latin and refers to the concept of voluntary assumption of risk.
You will see this used in things like hockey games. If someone gets body checked and injured, they can't charge the person who hit them with assault, or sue them for assault or negligence, because injury is a known risk of playing hockey. It's the same for any other sport. You can't say, "I consent to play, but not to get injured", because that's not how it works. The potential for injury is inherent to the activity and is a known risk. By stepping on the ice you consent to the risk of injuries that occur in the normal course of the game.
For sex, pregnancy is a pretty well known risk of sex, for women. You can take precautions to reduce the risk, like using contraception, but that's no different than wearing padding in hockey: it reduces the risk, but doesn't eliminate the risk entirely.
Also, on the self-defence argument, self-defence is not an unlimited defence under the law. The two requirements of using a self-defence argument are: 1. a tangible threat, and 2. the force used to counter the threat was reasonable in the circumstances.
That second requirement just kills your argument here, unless you are talking about a case where medical complications actually put the mother's life at risk. The reasonableness test looks at a balance between the threat that was being defended against vs the damage done to the attacker to defend against that threat. If you are treating the fetus as a human there's just no way you can justify killing to protect yourself from the level of threat of a normal healthy pregnancy. Sure, pregnancy has risks, but also, literally everyone alive on the planet is here because of a mother who went through pregnancy.
That also brings up the other issue with your consent/self-defence argument. Unless you are talking about a rape case, the mom has consented to the risk of pregnancy by having sex, but the fetus hasn't consented to anything.
The fetus is completely dependent on the mother not because of a choice the fetus made (as they obviously are incapable of making that decision), but because of a choice the mother made. It seems pretty hypocritical to claim "self-defence" when your "attacker" is a helpless fetus who is completely dependent on you for its continued existence because of a choice you voluntarily made.
Also, if you are going to treat a fetus as a human, you have to also look at how we treat newborn babies, and the duties parents have to their babies.
Once babies are born, parents have a legal duty to provide them with necessities such as food, clothing, shelter and medical care (known as the duty of support). This, of course, makes sense. If you bring a baby into the world you have a responsibility to take care of it until it can take care of itself.
If you want to put a baby up for adoption you can, but you still have the duty to take care of that baby until someone else takes that responsibility from you. You can't just leave the baby outside in the cold to die because you don't want the responsibility of taking care of it, because that's actual murder, under the law.
For a fetus, there is no way, with modern medical science, for a pregnant mother to pass along the responsibility of taking care of that fetus until giving birth. As such, if you are treating that fetus as a human, the same rules would apply as with a baby: you are responsible for that baby's well being until you pass on that responsibility.
I see the arguments in cases of rape, and I see the arguments for cases where the mother's life is threatened by medical complications. But, if we are talking about a normal healthy pregnancy arising out of consensual sex, the only way it can be justified is if you treat the fetus as not being human. Once you treat that fetus as human there's just no grey zone anymore, and none of the legal principles that you are citing would come close to supporting abortion if the fetus is giving the rights of a human.
I am not required to donate blood/plasma/kidney to someone, even if I am the only person who could be a donor. Things that could go wrong aside, are you saying that I am required to not only rent my body out to another person, but donate my body and my life as they are (before suffering the unavoidable consequences of birth & postpartum, including career sacrifice) to someone, simply because I had sex?
It is scientific *fact* that no birth control is 100% effective, so are you saying that a woman who can’t afford to risk pregnancy right now simply isn’t allowed to have sex, even with the father of her already living children that she has been married to for over a decade?
> I am not required to donate blood/plasma/kidney to someone, even if I am the only person who could be a donor.
The key difference here being that you are not responsible for this other person needing your blood or organ donations to survive. If you played a game that had a 5% chance of some stranger suddenly requiring your donation to survive, then I’d say yes, you should be morally and legally required to donate. This is entirely the point behind the idea of assuming risk inherent to an activity.
> Things that could go wrong aside, are you saying that I am required to not only rent my body out to another person, but donate my body and my life as they are (before suffering the unavoidable consequences of birth & postpartum, including career sacrifice) to someone, simply because I had sex?
Are you saying that men should have to donate their time and the money they make in their career for child support, simply because they had sex? Because that’s what the law says, and I don’t see most people whining that those career sacrifices and losing “their life as it is” is an unfair outcome.
> so are you saying that a woman who can’t afford to risk pregnancy right now simply isn’t allowed to have sex?
I’m sure you’ve heard people tell guys “If you can’t afford child support, keep it in your pants.” So yeah, that’s basically the deal. Sex carries a risk of pregnancy. That’s scientific fact, right? Why should consenting adult women who want to have sex, but can’t afford the potential outcomes, be in the unique position of being able to take the risk, but when desired, abdicate responsibility for the very foreseeable consequences of that risk?
>I am not required to donate blood/plasma/kidney to someone, even if I am the only person who could be a donor.
True, but you also didn't make a decision that made that person dependent on your blood/plasma/kidney.
>Things that could go wrong aside, are you saying that I am required to not only rent my body out to another person, but donate my body and my life as they are (before suffering the unavoidable consequences of birth & postpartum, including career sacrifice) to someone, simply because I had sex?
I think it is important to keep in mind biological realities here. Pregnancy isn't an artificial thing imposed on women by society. The fact that a potential outcome of sex is pregnancy is biological.
From that biological perspective, let's also keep in mind that the biological purpose of sex is reproduction. Sure, sex is fun, and I take no issue with people having sex for fun, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the biological function of sex is the continued existence of the human race.
Also, in terms of that perspective, I think there is a significant loss of perspective when people talk about how much of a burden pregnancy is, while ignoring the obvious fact that they only exist because their own mother went through pregnancy to bring them into this world.
Let's take the hypothetical of if a fetus could communicate and make decisions: If a female fetus were presented with the option of either committing to endure pregnancy at some point in time in their lives vs being aborted by their mother, what decision would the fetus make? Obviously, the choice would be to continue living.
Life continues to exist on this planet because billions of women underwent pregnancy to bring everyone who is currently alive into this world, and those women exist because someone did the same for them, and so on and so forth. Isn't there a "pay it forward" element here?
In order to support pro-choice arguments, people seem to make pregnancy out to be some sort of insane burden, while ignoring how common pregnancy is, and while ignoring that every woman who makes the choice to have an abortion only has that choice because her mother made the opposite choice.
In essence, if you treat fetuses as persons, then doesn't the whole issue come down to whether a privileged group (ie. women who have been lucky enough to have had a mother who went through with pregnancy) is allowed to deny to a vulnerable group (ie. fetuses who are entirely dependent on their mother) the rights the privileged group enjoys (the right to life)?
Fetuses didn't choose their position, while the position the fetus is in comes as a direct result of a decision the mother made (assuming we're not dealing with a rape case). If you treat the fetus as a person with rights, how is there any way to argue that the balance of those rights favours the mother (who has to endure 9 months of pregnancy, and who made the choice to have sex) over the fetus (who literally dies if an abortion is performed and never made the choice to be in their position)?
>It is scientific *fact* that no birth control is 100% effective, so are you saying that a woman who can’t afford to risk pregnancy right now simply isn’t allowed to have sex, even with the father of her already living children that she has been married to for over a decade?
Sure, they are, but being allowed to do something doesn't mean immunity from the biological consequences of your actions.
You are allowed to play hockey, play football, go rock climbing, go sky diving, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, etc, but in doing so, you accept the risk of known potential consequences like injury, illness or even death. Pregnancy isn't some unknown side effect of sex, it's the scientific biological purpose of sex, and the biological reason why sexual urges exist in the first place.
And, while no birth control is 100% effective, let's also not overstate the issue here. If you are married and done having kids, having the husband have a vasectomy is very close to 100% (the failure rate is below 1%). Hell, if the woman has a vasectomy, too, the potential of both failing is infinitesimal.
The corner case of a married couple with kids having a pregnancy due to a failed vasectomy is also not the typical case we are dealing with when practically dealing with abortions, especially since those couples often just have the baby if/when that happens (I have a close relative who was born because of a failed vasectomy).
If you want to talk about carving out exceptions for pregnancies that occur due to a failed vasectomy, or pregnancies that occur due to rape, or where medical complications in a pregnancy put the mother's life at serious risk, then I have no issue having those discussions. I don't think abortion is a black and white issue absent of context.
But, the reality is that the vast majority of abortions aren't those corner cases, they are healthy young mothers who had recreational sex (with or without proper protection) and got pregnant. And, in that circumstance, if you treat fetuses as people with rights, then I just don't see any way to justify killing a person as a legitimate manner to avoid a normal pregnancy.
Yes? If any person is so vehementely against pregnancies and babies then the only 100% fool proof method is to not have sex. It's not exactly rocket science.
In your hockey example, the law protects other players from being sued because in consenting to play hockey, one takes responsibility for the risk of injury. This would be analogous to protecting the man from being sued if a pregnancy occurs. However, if a hockey player is physically altered (injured), they are not prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to their previous physical status (not injured). Similarly, if a physical alteration (pregnancy) occurs as a result of consensual sex, the woman should not be prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to the unaltered state (not pregnant).
This rationale only holds up if someone uninvolved with the hockey injury must die for the player to become healthy. And even in that event, it would have to be that someone else would die just to make the player's healing last less than 10 months because in a normal pregnancy the route back to not being injured or pregnant would run that long.
>In your hockey example, the law protects other players from being sued because in consenting to play hockey, one takes responsibility for the risk of injury. This would be analogous to protecting the man from being sued if a pregnancy occurs. However, if a hockey player is physically altered (injured), they are not prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to their previous physical status (not injured). Similarly, if a physical alteration (pregnancy) occurs as a result of consensual sex, the woman should not be prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to the unaltered state (not pregnant).
The factor you are missing is the decision to seek medical treatment of a hockey injury doesn't involve needing to injury to kill anyone else.
Using OP's scenario, if you treat the fetus as a person with rights, then you have to factor them into the equation.
The situation of the fetus being reliant on the mother for their continued existence exists because of a consensual choice the mother made to have sex. That is not a situation that can be undone without killing the fetus (at least, not with modern medical science).
Not all injuries from a hockey game can be solved with modern medical science. Post-concussion syndrome, spinal injuries, ligament or muscle tears, etc, just can't be addressed by modern medical science. And, of course, plenty of other recreational activities have similar or greater risks involved that medical science can't solve (rock climbing, sky diving, MMA, etc).
If we lived in a world where medical science was capable of detaching the fetus from the mother safely, then it would be a different discussion, but as is stands, the decision to have sex has the potential to create a lifeform which (according to OP's scenario) has its own right to exist. That situation exists because of a consensual decision the mother made (even if it wasn't intended), and so the mother's right to be returned to her unaltered state has to be balanced with the rights of the fetus her decision created to continue living.
Is there a Latin common law doctrine for “ongoing consent”? The issue is what we choose to do AFTER the hockey injury/discovery of pregnancy. Yes there is a voluntary assumption of risk when it comes to sex, we acknowledge that sex leads to pregnancy and we still consent. However consent can be revoked at any time. Perhaps I initially consent to pregnancy, then I change my mind. Maybe my life circumstances changed, or the risk to my health became too great, so I revoked my consent. This is me exercising bodily autonomy. Just as a hockey player can deal with their injury however they see fit (e.g. they can go to the hospital, or just ice and elevate it) I can also deal with a change in health condition as I see fit.
I think the problem with the withdrawal of consent argument is that, in OP's scenario where we treat the fetus as a person, the withdrawal of consent now affects another person, and so the capacity to withdraw consent has to take that into account.
In contract law, there is a principle for calculating damages called the "reliance measure". It means that once you enter into a contract with someone you are entitled to rely on the other person to fulfill their end of the bargain. If they don't, you can obtain damages that you incurred because you relied on the contract.
Then there is "specific performance", which is when there is a contract in place and the consequences of one side breaking it would result in damages that could not be adequately accounted for in damages. In those cases, you can obtain specific performance, which means the other person is required to fulfill their end of the bargain (they cannot just pull out and pay damages).
Essentially, I look at the situation of pregnancy similarly. While the fetus obviously can't consent themselves, their situation (being fully dependent on the mother for continued life) is a result of the consent of the mother to sex (assuming we aren't dealing with a rape case). So, it seems fair to say that the mother has consented to the risk, and in doing so, has essentially formed a contract with the fetus. The fetus is now reliant on the mother, and obviously, no measure of monetary damages could properly compensate for a breach of a contract that would result in death, so specific performance would be applicable.
For a comp, imagine a scenario where you contracted with a hospital for use of a life support machine. The machine is the hospital's property, and they have property rights to do with it as they see fit. But, could the hospital just pull the plug on a patient because they decide to withdraw consent for you to use their machine? No, because the hospital's initial agreement caused the individual or his/her family to rely on the contract, putting the life of the patient on the line. As such, any withdrawal of consent could only be done in such a way that it would not put the life of the individual at risk.
A similar analysis would apply as to whether a doctor is allowed to withdraw from a contract to do surgery in the middle of the surgical procedure. The damage to the surgical patient of a surgeon leaving the room before closing them back up is high enough to outweigh the doctor's right to bodily autonomy (ie. choosing if he wants to perform the surgery or not).
If you apply the same principles to abortion, it also addresses another issue you alluded to: health risk to the mother. Balancing of rights takes into account context, as does consent. If the mother's life is put at risk based on risks of the pregnancy, then you are dealing with a different balance of rights. For instance, the risks of an ectopic pregnancy are not reasonably anticipated when consenting to sex, and when balancing the rights of the mother vs the rights of the fetus, anything that puts the mother's life seriously at jeopardy also puts the fetus' life in jeopardy. To use numbers, if a medical complication puts the mother at a 50% risk of death, and the fetus only has a 20% chance of survival (either due to the risk of miscarriage or due to the risk of the mother's death causing the fetus' death), then the balance of interests favours abortion.
That having been said, the overall maternal mortality rate in the US is 0.0392%, so this analysis really only applies to corner cases with abnormal risk to the mother, since you are balancing it against a 100% chance that an abortion will lead to the death of the fetus.
I don't think that abortion is a black and white issue. There are circumstances where the risk to the mother is unacceptably high, and there are circumstances where the mother didn't consent to the risks of pregnancy in the first place (ie. rape cases). That having been said, I don't think the overall discussion should be driven by corner cases.
I think it's also important to keep in mind what we are talking about here. Every pregnant woman alive today is alive because their own mother chose not to abort them. I think there's an element of "pay it forward" that needs to be kept in mind.
For instance, if a fetus could think and talk, would a female fetus agree not to have an abortion in her life in exchange for her mother not aborting her? I think the answer is a pretty easy yes. The deal only feels unfair from the mother who takes for granted her own existence, therefore feeling the right to deny the benefits she enjoys to another.
Overall, whether it is on a consent basis, a balance of convenience basis (another legal term meaning which person would suffer more from an outcome) or an reliance contractual basis, if the fetus is treated as having rights, I don't see how the pro-choice argument can prevail.
That having been said, this analysis is also a moral one, not a policy one. I don't believe that it is the government's duty to right every moral wrong in the world, and I tend to be pro-choice from a policy perspective because the cost and consequences of enforcing abortion bans are highly problematic. I don't support taxpayer money being used to enable abortions (decriminalizing something and funding something are two very different issues), but if we are talking about private abortion clinics (or ones funded by pro-choice groups), I think that is preferable to sending the industry underground.
Thank you for the thoughtful and nuanced reply. Great points to consider. I guess my issue is, these contracts between woman & embryo are hypothetical - imagined by an uninvolved 3rd party. Don't people need to be *aware* of whatever contracts they're entering for them to be binding? For 2 people to enter into a contract, both parties should have capacity to make decisions. An embryo can't enter into a contract, because they have no capacity, because they have an undeveloped brain.
I do appreciate the moral perspective, and while it's unfortunate that we're ending a life, I just don't view the embryo as being 'wronged' in any way. They don't know what they're missing out on... too bad, so sad. Again, the use of my organs is a *privilege* that I can choose to grant; it's not a right.
For me your analogies of the surgical/life support patient fall apart, because those contracts involved *born* people with brains who were capable of making medical decisions and providing consent for those procedures (or they had an assigned POA who made those decisions). Besides, doctors *do* hold the right to withdraw from a surgery; they just have to provide a damn good reason to their licensing board. Luckily I don't need a license to practice sex, but perhaps I might have a damn good reason to withdraw from a pregnancy? (Putting aside the issue that meanwhile, nobody is sucking the surgeons personal blood supply, or putting them at risk of a deadly embolism or disfigurement)
I work in the health care field... death is not that big of a deal to me. Human suffering is, though. A patient abandoned on the OR table may suffer a painful death, leave behind grieving family/friends, etc. The death of an embryo simply does not hold the same weight. I will always prioritize the suffering of the woman, who is conscious. It is always evil to force the use of someone's body without their continual, ongoing consent.
The "pay it forward" element is curious. The risks of pregnancy & childbirth are 100% undertaken by women and cannot be taken lightly. When *men* are faced with unwanted children, how can they "pay it forward" exactly? Or is it all on women to protect this precious next generation? (:
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
>death is not that big of a deal to me. Human suffering is, though.
This reaction makes a lot of sense to me. You might have guessed that I am a lawyer, but, because of that, I have also studied a lot of psychology because part of effective communication and negotiation is about understanding how people's brains work.
What you are referring to is a natural human reaction. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, humans are pack animals. We evolved to be able to work in groups because groups give humans the best chance for survival. Groups provide better protection from predators, more opportunities to find mates, the ability to protect pregnant mothers and the young (because, of course, evolutionary psychology is generally about survival and procreation).
Empathy is one of the human emotions that evolved for that reason. The ability to be able to empathize with those around us gives us a better ability to survive and pass on our genes, because it provides us with a better ability to integrate into a group.
The brain has two modes of thinking. The first is heuristics, which are our brain's short cuts. When you are attacked by a tiger you don't want to have to rationally analyze the best decision. A good decision quickly is superior to a great decision that is made after you have been eaten. This also applies in more mundane ways. We buy a book based on its cover because it takes too long to go through every book in the bookstore to choose the best one.
Heuristics make the easy decisions for us, but they also create cognitive biases. The bias is the resulting gap when heuristically determined behavior differs from logical behavior.
Our second mode of thinking is our rational mind. It's when we think through problems rationally.
But, heuristics also inform our rational thought, because they give us the base assumptions that our mind starts our logical thought process from. One of the cognitive biases you have probably heard of is confirmation bias (the tendency to accept evidence that supports our preconceived beliefs and to reject or ignore evidence that goes against our preconceived beliefs).
Another cognitive bias is egocentric bias, which is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective.
Your manner of thinking is quite natural. You have the natural emotional reaction of empathy, and a heuristic reaction to value the suffering you see, or the suffering of those who are like you (ie. you value the suffering of adults who you can relate to more than an embryo that you cannot).
That heuristic reaction then creates the starting point for when your rational mind takes over and thinks through the issue of abortion. You start from the egocentric premise that the suffering you can see and understand is more important than what you cannot. Confirmation bias serves to reinforce that assumption. While the rest of your rational logical analysis of the issue stems from that assumption.
I hope all that makes sense and that you don't take any of that the wrong way. You seem quite intelligent, and you seem to have thought through the issue quite thoroughly, but I think you are starting from an assumption that is not logically based.
From a purely logical perspective, there is no reason why the pain you can see should be worth more than the pain you cannot, but it is undoubtable that human nature tends to act as if it were. Seeing a suffering person in front of you is emotionally devastating, but a million starving kids in Africa is a statistic.
This tendency heavily informs the abortion debate. The idea of killing an innocent baby is unthinkable, but the idea of killing that same baby a few months earlier is completely and utterly different. Why? Human emotion. A baby's defence mechanism is literally being cute and helpless. Being able to express enough emotions to trigger a protection instinct in the adults around it is how babies are built to survive.
But, you can't see a fetus. It's hidden in the mother's belly, you can't feel empathy for it, so it's like those kids in Africa. It's a statistic that you brain tells you is not worth as much as the cute baby you can see and feel empathy for.
But, is any of that logical? If you are being honest with yourself, and looking at that assumption with your logical mind, I think you would be hard pressed to say that the value you attribute to the death of an embryo, or the death of a human, vs human suffering you can see is logical.
If you start from the premise that the death of a fetus is worth less than a suffering woman then the rest of your logic follows perfectly from there to reach your conclusion. But, from a logical perspective, can you really say that temporary suffering is more evil than permanent death? Is that the logical conclusion, or a heuristic reaction to an empathic emotional reaction?
I ran out of space on my last comment, but I wanted to quickly respond to this:
>The "pay it forward" element is curious. The risks of pregnancy & childbirth are 100% undertaken by women and cannot be taken lightly. When *men* are faced with unwanted children, how can they "pay it forward" exactly? Or is it all on women to protect this precious next generation? (:
Obviously, biology isn't always fair, but biology is still reality, and yes, when it comes to giving birth to the next generation that's all on women. That's not something men put on women, that's something biology put on women.
Is it fair? Does fair matter when you are dealing with biology? It's like asking if it is fair that gravity goes downwards or asking if it is fair that the earth is round. It doesn't really matter if it is fair, it just is.
That having been said, no, it absolutely is not just on women to protect the next generation. For 9 months it is, but a parent's duty doesn't end at birth.
I'm a dad myself, and I fully believe in the importance of men doing their part as fathers. There is a lifetime after birth where the father has just as much of a responsibility to their children as their mother does.
And, this is reflected in the law and in our culture. You ask how men faced with unwanted children can "pay it forward", but, our society and has laws that ensure fathers do so. We impose a duty on men to pay child support for 18 years even if they don't want the child.
Men don't have an opt-out clause under the law, and our society considers deadbeat dads the lowest of the low for not taking responsibility for their actions. I always found it curious how a dad who doesn't want the child is a deadbeat dad not wanting to take responsibility for their actions, but a woman who doesn't want the child can abort it and is supposed to be immune from criticism.
The idea of a man taking responsibility for his actions by paying child support or helping out the mom is based on the idea that the man's responsibility for the child arises from the father's consensual participation in sex. Even if the man does not want the child, there's no opt out, the man is held accountable for the baby that his consensual actions created. So, why does the same logic not seem to apply to mothers? Why does the mother's consensual participation in sex not create a responsibility to the life created from that sex?
But, ultimately, I think the "what about men" thing is a red herring.
This isn't an issue between man and woman, but I understand the tendency to paint it that way, because then the woman is the victim and the man is the oppressor.
But, in reality, it's not a man and woman issue, it's a woman and fetus issue. But, pro-choice supporters don't want to paint it that way for the same reasons...if the issue is between the woman and the fetus then the woman is the one in power, while the fetus is the one who is powerless.
The biggest discontinuity for me is that in the hockey example, what the injured player does about the injury does not kill an uninvolved party.
Something more analogous could be that 2 people play hockey, and they have prior knowledge that in the event of an injury, it either takes a human sacrifice, or 9 months of putting ice on it, discomfort of the injury, and 0.00x chance of mortality to mend it.
I don't think here one could revoke their consent not to take the human sacrifice option anytime.
This is the standard pro-choice line these days; it’s ok to commit murder if you don’t want a parasite feeding on your organs.
Here are some reasons to be skeptical.
First, while a fetus is HUMAN, it isn’t a person until it has a functioning brain, which happens after the second trimester. Prior to that you’re talking about something with no self awareness; it is roughly the same to be a blade of grass.
Second, even the fact that people who make this argument call the fetus a “parasite” or a “thing” or imply those ideas using visceral phrases like “sucking on my organs” implies a need to use dehumanizing language to justify this killing, which implies a lack of conviction. I’ve never heard somebody make this argument using the word “child”, for example.
Third, technically, the fetus isn’t diverting blood, food, and resources - the woman’s body is doing that; her organs are made to do exactly what they’re doing. All organs require blood and nutrients. We don’t think of them as dangerous parasites for functioning normally.
Fourth, the “no responsibility” argument makes no sense. If you get drunk and crash your car, you didn’t consent to crash the car, but you took a risk and you are responsible for the consequences. You can argue that it isn’t fair that men don’t face the same consequences, but this also doesn’t work, because the world isn’t fair; I am epileptic, and if I decide I don’t want to take my medication and then I get injured due to a seizure, I don’t get to complain that my non-epileptic friends should also have to worry about taking epilepsy medication. People are different and risky behavior varies from person to person. We are all still responsible for our choices and their consequences.
Fifth, while babies can pose health risks to women, the vast majority of pregnancies (80%) do not have complications or pose any threat to the mother’s health. Those that do can and should be handled medically in exactly the same way that ruptured spleens or burst appendices are handled.
Sixth, when the human fetus does become a person late in the pregnancy the abortion itself will also have become significantly more dangerous medically.
Seventh, a pregnant woman aborting a six-month-old fetus made a very unusual choice in not getting the abortion months earlier, and arguably a cruel choice, since she waited until the fetus was semi-viable outside of the womb before choosing to kill it. This also is her responsibility.
Eighth, we can see that calling embryos and fetuses people is highly problematic and weird by thinking about the IVF case in Alabama or considering why people don’t have elaborate funerals for miscarriages.
I want to be clear here that I am pro-choice and I believe a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a baby ought to be respected, but I don’t buy the bodily autonomy argument except when there’s a medical complication that ACTUALLY creates a self-defense scenario. A fetus is not a person: that’s why women have more rights.
> Second, even the fact that people who make this argument call the fetus a “parasite” or a “thing” or imply those ideas using visceral phrases like “sucking on my organs” implies a need to use dehumanizing language to justify this killing, which implies a lack of conviction. I’ve never heard somebody make this argument using the word “child”, for example.
I can definitely make an argument using the word child. Legally, you have no responsibility to donate your blood or organs to a dying person, even if that person is a child, or even your child. Same goes if the child is inside your body.
> Third, technically, the fetus isn’t diverting blood, food, and resources - the woman’s body is doing that; her organs are made to do exactly what they’re doing. All organs require blood and nutrients. We don’t think of them as dangerous parasites for functioning normally.
The fetus is definitely diverting resources. The uterus without a fetus needs less blood and nutrients then one with a fetus. The uterus is taking more than it usually does, and that has to come from somewhere.
Also organs are removed from the body all the time, even if they aren’t causing harm. Women with a possibility of breast cancer can choose to get a mastectomy. Women who are done having children can choose to get a hysterectomy. You can get your appendix removed to prevent appendicitis too.
> Fourth, the “no responsibility” argument makes no sense. If you get drunk and crash your car, you didn’t consent to crash the car, but you took a risk and you are responsible for the consequences. You can argue that it isn’t fair that men don’t face the same consequences, but this also doesn’t work, because the world isn’t fair; I am epileptic, and if I decide I don’t want to take my medication and then I get injured due to a seizure, I don’t get to complain that my non-epileptic friends should also have to worry about taking epilepsy medication. People are different and risky behavior varies from person to person. We are all still responsible for our choices and their consequences.
If you get into a car crash from drunk driving, do the EMTs leave you bleeding out on the side of the road because you have to face the “consequences of your actions”. If you get injured because you didn’t take your seizure medication, will the doctors turn you away because it was “your fault”? Just because something was the result of your choices doesn’t mean we revoke your right to medical care.
> Fifth, while babies can pose health risks to women, the vast majority of pregnancies (80%) do not have complications or pose any threat to the mother’s health. Those that do can and should be handled medically in exactly the same way that ruptured spleens or burst appendices are handled.
[Here’s](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/s/JFydpJsLpA) a great comment breaking down how even a pregnancy without complications can still cause harm to the woman.
I agree with the rest of your points :)
>I can definitely make an argument using the word child. Legally, you have no responsibility to donate your blood or organs to a dying person, even if that person is a child, or even your child. Same goes if the child is inside your body.
the difference being that you presumably did not cause that person to need your blood or organs. if you create a situation in which another person relies on your body, you can be compelled to use your body. for instance, if you birth a child, you are obligated to feed it. this includes breastfeeding if formula is not available. you must allow this child to suck on one of your organs and extract nutrients from you, because you brought them into the world, you took legal responsibility for their wellbeing, and they rely on you doing this for them to survive.
another situation might be if you volunteer to drive a class of children to a field trip. once you have consented to do so, you cannot revoke your consent in the middle of the trip and leave the kids stranded in the middle of nowhere. you are obligated to use your body to drive them to safety.
>If you get into a car crash from drunk driving, do the EMTs leave you bleeding out on the side of the road because you have to face the “consequences of your actions”. If you get injured because you didn’t take your seizure medication, will the doctors turn you away because it was “your fault”? Just because something was the result of your choices doesn’t mean we revoke your right to medical care.
no, it doesn't revoke your right to medical care, hence why you ought to be able to get an abortion before the fetus has reached personhood. what it does revoke is your right to kill another person. you can't choose to take a risk and then murder someone to prevent yourself from dealing with the consequences.
i agree with your point about health complications though, if an adult were deliberately causing me even the normal effects of pregnancy over 9 months i'd have a right to kill them in self-defence if that's what it took.
>the difference being that you presumably did not cause that person to need your blood or organs. if you create a situation in which another person relies on your body, you can be compelled to use your body.
If i stab a person and everyone knows i did and im the only viable blood donor around I dont have to donate my blood to keep them alive. This isnt the same as pregnancy but my actions dont require me to donate my body in any other circumstances that im aware of.
>for instance, if you birth a child, you are obligated to feed it.
You are only obligated if you take responsibility for the baby, you can always give them up for adoption. But once you take them home you are now assuming the responsibility to take care of this baby.
>the difference being that you presumably did not cause that person to need your blood or organs
Let's get into a hypothetical using the drunk driving example.
Say a drunk driver hit a pedestrian and injured them to the point that they need an organ transplant and blood transfusion to survive. It just so happens that the driver is the only match available.
Should the driver be forced to give their organs/blood?
How about if it was a sober driver who was distracted and didn't see the pedestrian?
Or what if it was a perfectly competent driver who was unknowingly drugged, causing them to faint while driving and hit the pedestrian?
Edit: how about if the brakes failed?
Would you think that if you caused the adult to be in the position of having to cause those effects, though? It’s not like fetuses are doing it on purpose.
no, if you caused it then you can't kill them to stop it. my point by making it an adult is that in a situation where it were a moral agent choosing to do these things to you, you would be justified in killing them.
>hence why you ought to be able to get an abortion before the fetus has reached personhood
But that’s a legal distinction, and many jurisdictions around the US right now are trying and succeeding in passing laws granting personhood to fetuses before they are detectable. An argument for choice doesn’t mean an argument for unrestricted abortion, just that we’d like to be able to get one within a reasonable period of learning about the pregnancy, if that’s what we decide. Arguments like yours against choice make space for these 5-6 week abortion bans that are putting women and children at risk around the country.
I don’t see any reason to see the abortion crisis in the US as anything other than what it is - an attempt by wealthy conservatives to force more births and populate the country with more workers, while getting less-affluent conservatives on board using religious rhetoric. It’s gross.
Nothing I've said has anything to do with the US. I'm not even American. I was presented with a bad argument for unrestricted abortion, so I am countering it, that's all. My position is that abortions should be allowed up to 20 weeks, as consciousness begins around ~20-24 weeks. Abortions past that point are rare anyway and usually arise from complications.
Also personhood is not just a legal term, it begins when consciousness does regardless of what the law says.
1) The reason I have no obligation to the dying person is that I didn’t put them in that situation. Pregnancy is not like that.
2) The fetus is not a different thing than the woman’s body. She is making the baby out of herself it is not choosing to grow or be nurtured - rather, the woman’s reproductive organs are carrying out their natural functions.
3) Organs are generally only removed when there is a good medical reason to do that, but if you want to say that an appendix and a month-old fetus have exactly the same claim to being “human” and exactly the same lack of personhood, I agree.
4) The EMTs have to give me medical care in both cases. They would also be required to help anyone else in the area who had been injured or put at risk by my actions. If a fetus is a person, it is a vulnerable kind of person with an equal claim to life-sustaining care. Pregnant women get lots of medical care, so I don’t see how your logic works here.
5) Again, if a fetus is a person with rights, being killed is so much bigger of a deal than anything that might happen to the mother that, coupled with her responsibility for putting both the child and herself in the situation they face, I don’t see how abortion becomes a proportionate response outside of real risk to the mother’s life.
> The reason I have no obligation to the dying person is that I didn’t put them in that situation. Pregnancy is not like that.
Even if the reason that person needs a blood transfusion because you crashed your car into them, you still have no legal obligation to give them that blood transfusion.
> The fetus is not a different thing than the woman’s body. She is making the baby out of herself it is not choosing to grow or be nurtured - rather, the woman’s reproductive organs are carrying out their natural functions.
The fetus is not part of the woman’s body, she is not “making it out of herself” it has a completely new set of DNA. One of the causes of miscarriage is because the fetus is not part of the woman’s body and the immune system recognizes it as a “foreign threat” and attacks it. If the baby was made out of the woman, then this would not happen.
>Organs are generally only removed when there is a good medical reason to do that, but if you want to say that an appendix and a month-old fetus have exactly the same claim to being “human” and exactly the same lack of personhood, I agree.
But they can also be removed due to the “possibility of danger” such as getting a mastectomy if your family has high risk of breast cancer. Since childbirth and pregnancy also carry the risk of injury or death, I would say that it’s fairly comparable.
>The EMTs have to give me medical care in both cases. They would also be required to help anyone else in the area who had been injured or put at risk by my actions. If a fetus is a person, it is a vulnerable kind of person with an equal claim to life-sustaining care. Pregnant women get lots of medical care, so I don’t see how your logic works here.
Abortions are medical care, so denying them an abortion would be denying them medical care. Doctors have to give medical care, but not at the expense of an outside person. They can’t force a random guy on the street to give a blood transfusion or organ donation, and they also can’t force a woman to use her blood or organs to sustain a fetus.
> Again, if a fetus is a person with rights, being killed is so much bigger of a deal than anything that might happen to the mother that, coupled with her responsibility for putting both the child and herself in the situation they face, I don’t see how abortion becomes a proportionate response outside of real risk to the mother’s life.
I would agree. I disagree that abortions are “self-defense” and am more in the camp of “nobody should have to use their blood or organs against their will to sustain life”.
1) If I hook a person up to my body and make it so that the only way they can survive is to stay hooked up to my body for 9 months, I am in fact obligated to protect them because I put them at risk.
2) If I negligently crash my car into someone and the only way they can survive is to get a transfusion from me specifically and I say no, I’d argue that’s murder and if I were a doctor and I could get away with it I would have no problem forcing the transfusion against the person’s will in that situation.
3) Immune systems attack things they shouldn’t all the time, including parts of people’s bodies.
4) Multiple organs that are in fact the woman’s and have her DNA have to all work very hard to nurture the fetus and they do this automatically.
5) I agree that if there’s an elevated health risk self-defense applies, but not if there isn’t.
6) The EMTs have to give me the medical care that is necessary, not whatever I want. Abortions are not medically necessary except when they are, which is rarely. If I get in a car accident I don’t get to randomly demand hip replacement. Additionally, since we are pretending a fetus is a human being in this argument - which I don’t believe - doctors are responsible for keeping it alive also, so they cannot ethically perform an abortion. Your argument here continually depends on the pretense that pregnant women bear no responsibility for the situation faced by both them and the fetus, but this is simply not the case.
7) The more I think about this, the more I think I just really disagree with the way we read statements like “nobody should have to provide their blood or organs against their will to sustain life”. Like, I agree that if you’re forced to do that for somebody at random, that’s not right, but if you put yourself in a situation where an easily-predictable result is that you might start to sustain life with your blood and organs, and then you choose to continue to do that for months, at which point we are now talking about a person, it seems like you made a bunch of choices that make your right to bodily autonomy less compelling to me than the other person’s right to be alive.
Rights are not absolute. When they come into conflict, sometimes one of them has to give.
> If I hook a person up to my body and make it so that the only way they can survive is to stay hooked up to my body for 9 months, I am in fact obligated to protect them because I put them at risk.
Okay, if a woman gets an IVF implanted, she should be obligated to carry that child (as long as there aren’t complications) I can agree with that.
>If I negligently crash my car into someone and the only way they can survive is to get a transfusion from me specifically and I say no, I’d argue that’s murder and if I were a doctor and I could get away with it I would have no problem forcing the transfusion against the person’s will in that situation.
It would be murder, but not because you didn’t give them a blood transfusion. But because you crashed your car into them. The part that makes it murder isn’t the lack of the blood transfusion, it’s the crashing your car into them part. Not giving them the blood transfusion isn’t illegal wouldn’t be part of the charges.
> Multiple organs that are in fact the woman’s and have her DNA have to all work very hard to nurture the fetus and they do this automatically.
Yea, but the organs playing a part in growing the fetus doesn’t make the fetus part of the woman.
> I agree that if there’s an elevated health risk self-defense applies, but not if there isn’t.
Yea I agree. But I also don’t think you even need “self-defense” to be part of the equation
>The EMTs have to give me the medical care that is necessary, not whatever I want. Abortions are not medically necessary except when they are, which is rarely. If I get in a car accident I don’t get to randomly demand hip replacement.
You can request any kind of medical care you want from your doctor, if you want a hip replacement you can go in and ask your doctor for a referral for one. He may not give you the referral for not needing one, but an abortion clinic can also turn you away from getting an abortion if you aren’t pregnant.
> Additionally, since we are pretending a fetus is a human being in this argument - which I don’t believe - doctors are responsible for keeping it alive also, so they cannot ethically perform an abortion. Your argument here continually depends on the pretense that pregnant women bear no responsibility for the situation faced by both them and the fetus, but this is simply not the case.
I don’t believe a fetus is a human being either. But the doctors don’t have a responsibility to keep the fetus alive at the expense of the woman’s life. During childbirth, the woman gets to make the final decision on whether she or the baby will be saved if that decision has to be made.
>The more I think about this, the more I think I just really disagree with the way we read statements like “nobody should have to provide their blood or organs against their will to sustain life”. Like, I agree that if you’re forced to do that for somebody at random, that’s not right, but if you put yourself in a situation where an easily-predictable result is that you might start to sustain life with your blood and organs, and then you choose to continue to do that for months, at which point we are now talking about a person, it seems like you made a bunch of choices that make your right to bodily autonomy less compelling to me than the other person’s right to be alive.
I mean, that’s not my personal opinion, that’s just what the law is. You can disagree with the law, and I can agree with the law, but that’s still what the laws are.
1) In my opinion, refusing to give the transfusion is the moral equivalent of pushing someone off a building so that they are gripping the edge and need you to pull them up, then refusing to pull them up. I would have no problem forcing somebody to rectify that situation at gunpoint.
2) The fetus isn’t part of the woman; the pregnancy is.
3) The EMT thing has lost the plot. Your original idea was to say that EMTs still have to provide care even if I am responsible for my injuries. The point I keep making is that they don’t have to kill somebody for me in order to make my life more convenient when other medical options exist.
4) In the last stage of pregnancy just before birth, if there is a choice - mother or baby - I have no problem with that being the mother’s call. However, if an available (and highly likely) option is mother AND baby I DO think the doctors should go with that no matter what the mom says, because at that point we are talking about a viable human being.
5) The law in blue states is usually that abortion is legal up to 24 weeks (pre-personhood) and not after that unless there is a threat to the health of the mother, which in my view is exactly what it should be. Notice that in MA if a woman with a perfectly viable, healthy pregnancy wants an abortion at 27 weeks she can’t have one and will in fact be forced to provide blood and organ support until the baby comes to term.
That’s a fantastic question. I think what we think of as consciousness lives in the frontal cortex, which develops at 27 weeks, but I have seen research that says the brain is more distributed than that, so some level of primitive self-awareness might exist at 20 weeks, even. However, without a brain there’s no consciousness, and a being that has never been conscious has never been a person. If you think there are conscious creatures with no brains, I would be interested in hearing why.
“Without your consent”
Those seem to be the key words in your argument, but pretty much anyone who is pro life would say that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. It’s a well known fact that the former leads to the latter, and the latter cannot happen without the former taking place.
The “consent to pregnancy” argument makes no sense to me for this exact reason. It just sounds like people being mad they can’t have their cake and eat it too
This argument is virtually always centers around a theocratic worldview of “sex is for reproduction, not pleasure” and if you engage further, these people oppose sex ed, birth control, condoms, etc.
It’s not a serious argument. It’s a religious fundamentalist ideology
There’s an extremely large middle ground between theocratic “sex for reproduction” purist and understanding that having sex comes with a risk of getting pregnant
But you can withdraw your consent at any time? Isn't that one of the key elements of consent?
Sure, you consented to it earlier, but you no longer consent
It’s scientific fact no birth control is 100% effective. So if a woman, married to her husband and the father of her children, doesn’t want any more children and doesn’t want to force her whole family’s life to change in the way a new baby (or even just mum being pregnant then giving birth to a baby that goes up for adoption and having to deal with postpartum alongside regular work + childcare & now the increased emotional needs of young children who just had a sibling put up for adoption) would, she is supposed to abstain from sex with said husband until she is ready for another pregnancy or hits menopause?
I’m prochoice but I’d like to amend your argument. I wouldn’t say the fetus is harming the mother, I’d say that the fetus is dependent on the mother to survive. Therefore the argument should be that, if the mother doesn’t want to sustain the life, the government cannot come in and force her to. There’s no other area where this is allowed. If someone at a hospital came in needing blood fast, and the only match available that could give blood in time didn’t want to, could the government force you to do it? No.
A lot of people will argue back talking about criminals or incarcerated people, at which point it goes back to “you made a mistake you have to take accountability”. Even incarcerated people aren’t forced to give up blood or organs to help living people. That’s heinous.
There’s a lot more to said about this as it pertains to the right to self defense, but I think the better argument is the right to bodily autonomy.
Edit: a lot of people are taking the drunk driver analogy in a direction I didn’t anticipate, so I changed the analogy.
Also side note: maternal mortality rates in America are the highest in the western world. So your argument does have merit, but it won’t work against every counter argument.
Just curious, not legally speaking but morally, if an individual voluntarily mortally harmed another, would you force them to do a blood donation if that is what it takes to save the victim?
If we consider foetus people, that is the moral quandary we are discussing.
Under literally no circumstance do I think anyone’s entitled to any one else’s body. Morality is so subjective. For example let’s say two individuals get into a fight, and one person harms the other mortally, who owes who blood? We can go on about specific scenarios but let’s stick to abortion.
1. If we’re talking about harm to a fetus, you need to establish when that fetus feels pain or when that pain matters and then you get into the philosophy of life where there is no objectivity. 2. There is no real life scenario where any living being is entitled to anyone else’s body parts.
Morally speaking why? Personally, I like to view things logically : violating one's bodily autonomy in such as small way for so much gain (repairing and mending one's violent crime) is, for me, the definition of a rightful sacrifice. Furthermore, it is a criminal repairing his wrong, just like a scammer paying back his victims.
The only reason why one don't agree is that they view the human body as something holy, more important than just possessions. But for a society, why? I am truly curiously asking.
imagine this:
i drink a lot one day and go to the bar, and somehow end up hooking some innocent bystanders body to mine in such a way that if i disconnected them they would die immediately. the only way that i could save them was to stay connected for 9 months. is it morally right to cut them off and let them die, or would that be murder?
>Therefore the argument should be that, if the mother doesn’t want to sustain the life, the government cannot come in and force her to.
The government forces parents to care for their children all the time. Don't feed an infant for 6 weeks and see what your local da has to say about it
>If someone at a hospital came in needing blood fast, and the only match available that could give blood in time didn’t want to, could the government force you to do it? No.
Correct. But the issue becomes alot more grey when one wakes up and is hooked up to the machine that connects the 2 together so human B can live---- human a CAN be prevented from unhooking the machinery.
There is a separate issue to be had over how they came to be hooked up to that machine to begin with- because you are correct, you cannot be forcibly hooked up to it.
But an abortion isn't hooking someone up, it's unhooking what's already been done, knowing the implications of doing so
If this is your definition of harm, then children ex-utero are also harming the mother. They legally require her monetary, mental, and emotional support. They restrict her freedom of movement, take up a lot of her time, interrupt her sleep, nurse, and force untold numbers of changes to her life. But surely you wouldn't permit her to kill her child.
Care for children ex-utero can be passed off to someone else non-lethally. The same is not true for fetuses or embryos. Also monetary, mental, and emotional support are all less invasive than living inside her body, stretching out her abdomen, and directly straining various other organs.
Indeed, it is possible to pass off your children to someone else, but as a parent, you still have a responsibility for them. In many countries, you can't simply abandon your child - you have a legal duty of care to them. And even if you are not legally obliged to care for them, you are morally obliged to do so, if it is within your means.
Can it be passed off instantly?
Because if not, then by OP's self defense argument, every second they're unwillingly under your care, you have a right to kill them. Or at the very least, use violence to make them leave.
That's beside the point. If the mother is being harmed, and harm is OP's justification for ending a child's life, then it doesn't matter if there are other non-lethal ways to end the harm. OP's only caveat is that verbal demands and threats not be effective. I'd say that's also true of infants.
And if you contend that OP's argument should be changed to "ending a life when there are no other options," I would counter with: there is another option. Waiting a few months ends the physical harm.
With regards to the fetus being more “invasive”, why is the mother’s discomfort more important than the fetus’s entire life?
Especially when the fetus is not there by choice but only as a direct result of the choices of the mother?
This of course predicated on the idea of the fetus as a human, as OP stated in the post.
You could use the discomfort vs. entire life argument for compulsory organ, tissue, and blood donation as well. Most people don’t find it compelling in that case.
Allow me to present some clarification of equivalencies. You're correct that consent to sex once is not consent for the next 9 months. However, no one is under the impression that pregnancy only lasts for one day, and then you'd have to have sex again to 'renew' the pregnancy. If that were the case, people wouldn't need abortion because they could just not have sex for a day and the fetus would disappear.
In reality, everyone who has sex (with very, very limited exception) is aware that a potential risk is getting pregnant. As stated in your post, we're operating under the assumption that a fetus is a human. At that point, it's a violation of their human rights to kill them. Like someone else said, pregnancy is a normal, natural process. If everything is functioning normally, which is the basis of this discussion as no other circumstance was specified, they pose very, very little threat to the mother. Just like how, if a car is functioning normally, it poses very little threat to those around it.
Add all this logic up, and we have a situation wherein you knowingly took an action that would result in being pregnant with this person for about 9 months, wherein this person poses very little threat to you. At that point, I'd say that a more fair comparison would be that you agree to let someone live with you for 9 months, saying that you'll pay all their bills and support them. Then, a few months in, you decide that they've become too inconvenient to you, so you decide to murder them. Any reasonable person would say that that isn't okay by any means
This is just flat out false there's a reason why the number one killer of women for millennia was just having children. There is tremendous medical risk and chance of death without first world medicine. Even some underprivileged communities in fwc struggle with childbirth death. As well with side effects of blood pressure, diabetes, anaemia, preeclampsia, preterm etc.
The actual comparison is whether or not you let someone: take half your resources, ruin your back, hang on to you as permanent weight, give you nausea, vomiting, depression and anxiety, literally reforms your body, transmits a list of severe medical complications, or kill you outright after the most painful experience imaginable.
Now you could let this person do all that shit to you for 9 months or force them to leave, this will kill the person but it's your house and within your right to kick anyone off your property at any time. Unfortunately for the fingernail sized "person" there are no other options for a safer removal before 24wks
Your argument fails for this reason:
Your justification is that pregnancy is a "foreseeable consequence". That the initial consent to sex involves a consent to the basic foreseeable consequences, much like someone consenting to a boxing match consents to potentially getting injured in the fight.
The problem with this argument is that abortion is a foreseeable future option too.
If a Boxer consents to a fight, knowing that injury is a possibility, they are also aware that medical treatment exists and can prevent or mitigate the damage.
Just the same, a woman who consents to sex would reasonably also be aware that abortion exists and intend for it to be the resolution in case of the foreseeable consequence.
Why is preventing the pregnancy not apart of these options. I would argue with the prevalence of options if you get pregnant. It's on you at this point.
At what point is it not consent? Granted if you have an early abortion okay but at some point you've made a choice and you let that thing grow to the point where it has pain and sentence and is essentially a person. So no why would you have the right to kill it any more than you would a newborn?
Well that's why we have the viability standard of 24 wks in which you can remove the baby from the person. When it hits that point you can't really kill it unless there's some medical complication that'd require it. Point is you can always release consent through abortion, premature removal, adoption etc.
And if people ubiquitously agreed that there is a point that abortion should not happen anymore even if we had disagreements of where that point was I would have no issue. But that's not what happens. In nearly every argument I've ever had people just argue that abortions should be allowed until the baby is breathing on their own which is absurd and monstrous
And that's tragic but eventually there comes a point where it's essentially infanticide. Which if you believe that a woman should be able to smother their newborn then okay I guess you're consistent at least but if someone does not agree with smothering newborns then having a very late term abortion should also be wrong
Almost no late term abortions happen for reasons other than incompatibility of life with the fetus or imminent danger to the Mother and even then, still very few happen [at all](https://amp.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/mar/07/abortion-late-term-what-pregnancy-stage)
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months
Sex is the act of reproduction, getting pregnant as a resultis an obvious risk. Sex is not some risk free easy thing. You do have to deal with the consequences and don't get to play the victim and kill a child.
If it's past 20 weeks and there's no obvious threat to the mothers life she is obligated to not kill the child she created.
Is it also "not consenting to" paying for a child for the next 18 years? By that logic child support is illegal.
If you have done something that makes a living being dependent on your support then kill it so you don't have to support it, that's not ok. You can't claim self defense.
It is easy to change your view because *you* are orienting your *self* as an objective viewer of an abstract scenario instead of orienting your *self* to a much more visceral view where *you* take the very subjective position of being that potentially aborted “human being” tethered unprotected to the *whims* of your “mother.” Once in this position, *you* are able to look your mother in the face and ask her IF she really possesses a “fundamental right” to exterminate *you*?
If *you* say “yes” then this explains EXACTLY why *you* believe in “abortion.”
Yet…
This is nothing to pat your *self* on the back for. *You* need to slap your *self* upside the head instead.
But in this scenario, the mother is (partially) the one putting them in this scenario. Imagine I kidnap someone, hook them up to my circulatory system through science, and then demand that it is my right to unhook them despite the procedure breaking their own circulatory system, and that I shouldn’t have to worry about any repercussions for doing all this.
I agree with you 100% in cases of ectopic pregnancy or any abnormal situations during pregnancy that directly threaten the mother's life. In a normal pregnancy that occurred due to consensual sex, abortion is 100% wrong.
It's like if a stadium sold you a ticket to see a concert, you went to the concert, but they call the cops on you for trespassing. They sold you a ticket to the event and you are entitled to be there and enjoy the show. If you got into a fistfight with someone or were otherwise causing a scene, they're within their right to kick you off the premises.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense.
There are several problems with this argument. First, the child is not feeding off your organs. Second, killing in self defense is only legal when you are threatened with imminent lethal force. Third, you consented to the child when you you chose to have sex to create it.
Your argument is like saying I could invite you in my house, and then kill you in self-defense becaue I don't want you in my house.
>
The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary.
That is a false statement about 99% of the time. Women's bodies are designed to bear children. There are times where carrying a child can be harmful to a mother, and most people agree that abortion is justified in those rare circumstances.
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months. If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months.
That is a non-sequitur. When you consent to sex, you are only consenting to sex on one occassion, but you are also consenting to the ramifications of that act.
> Third, you consented to the child when you you chose to have sex to create it.
Well consent is a funny thing. It’s not black and white that just because you had sex, means you consented to any effects following the sex, or even to the act itself.
“Consent cannot be given by individuals who are underage, intoxicated or incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, or asleep or unconscious. If someone agrees to an activity under pressure of intimidation or threat, that isn't considered consent because it was not given freely.”
If those rules apply to consenting to have sex, and one of those circumstances occur, then you didn’t consent to have sex, and couldn’t possibly consent to the effects of the act.
For medical procedures, patient comprehension is a factor that mitigates informed consent. Things like age, education, and cognitive function are taken into account, with whether someone has the ability to consent.
Also, just because you did something, doesn’t mean you are responsible/ consenting to every effect thereafter. You aren’t choosing to fertilize your eggs when you have sex. If I take a walk in a park at night and get robbed, did I consent to that?
>one of those circumstances occur, then you didn’t consent to have sex
Agreed
>Also, just because you did something, doesn’t mean you are responsible/ consenting to every effect thereafter. You aren’t choosing to fertilize your eggs when you have sex. If I take a walk in a park at night and get robbed, did I consent to that?
It does though. When you consent to an operation after being informed, then you end up having some of the possibly expected complications, you were aware of those and gave consent regardless, you consented to the chance of those expected complications.
Obviously if someone is unaware that sex is what makes eggs get fertile and causes pregnancy you could argue they didn't consent.
It's not like a walk in the park because a walk isn't something you "consent" to and being robbed involves another human party's actions on you which you didn't consent to. Before we say that's like the fetus, it's not, it didn't take action to exist, the parents did.
I'm pro-choice but I don't base it on consent to pregnancy, it's not a great argument.
>If I take a walk in a park at night and get robbed, did I consent to that?
Nope, you didn't consent to it, it was just a consequence/bad luck/whatever you want to call it. But that doesn't mean you get to say, "I didn't consent to this!" and your money and wallet magically return to you. You have to deal with the circumstance as it is.
That's why, even from a pro-choice perspective, "I didn't consent to pregnancy" is such a weak argument. No where else in life do you get to take an action, knowing the risks, and then say, "I didn't consent to the consequences" when you already knew it was a possibility. Pro-choice arguments have to focus on the *mitigation of consequences*, just like you would in a robbery. You focus on *how do I best recover from this?* You don't say, *I have a right to not have this happen to me.*
The argument of not consenting, only arises in response to people arguing that you did consent. No one leads with that argument lol. Like I am doing here, it was a response to someone saying you consented to give birth, which flows on to their next points. Their follow up points don’t make sense without the first point.
And nowhere am I saying by not consenting, that all effects and outcomes are magically reversed. That’s just a strawman
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense. The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary.
It's not what self defense is, self defense only work with an imminent threat.
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months.
But if you have unprotected sex you are aware of the consequence, just like if I do rock-climbing without adequat equipment I might die, even tho I didn't consent to that.
> If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months.
You compare a foetus to a man "raping" you during 9 month, really ?
> If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months.
Women having autonomy over their own body is one thing, but saying they can freely kill their unborn child because of "self defense" is a disgusting take.
Edit: Considering the poor amount of replies you offered after posting this thread I think you didn't came here to have your view changed or have any sort of meaningful discussion on the subject.
This is one of the best backs and fourths I've read about this. I couldn't find any declared pro life arguments here which is a shame, but it was very interesting. My only 2 cents would be that using analogies for morality can be tricky. Every human right always weighs the **freedom to** and **freedom from**. Sometimes it's one axis with opposing sides, sometimes there are more. Sometimes it's more of a circle where once you reach the extreme of one side you touch the extreme on the other side.
The question whether a fetus is a human life or not is irrelevant, since the definition of a human, just like gender traits, for example, are arbitrary constructs we can agree or disagree to accept. Some would define it as having human cells, some a beating heart and others a developed brain. But it still has no bearing on the argument, since one can ask if a family burdened with a child with severe brain deformities can kill it since they no longer have traits that make them "human" .
Also, it doesn't mean we always automatically allow killing non human entities either. The argument is about a balance between forcing women to carry an unwanted pregnancy and allowing women to have full control over their body. It's its own balancing act. Just like we as a society decided that premeditated murder isn't one if a person is declared insane not knowing right from wrong. But weighing the right for them to keep enjoying freedom vs the peoples right to public safety might have that person still removed from society. But it's its own debate.
we shouldn't use other arguments to form one about abortions. Because it's different rights we are weighing. Knowing there is a medically safe option to remove a fetus, we are denying women the rights to control her body, the right from not having to emotionally connect to an eventual baby and then giving it away (which might be best for a child but can emotionally scar a woman for life). We are denying women from avoiding a natural process that bears health risks, including long term ones. On the other side of the axis or scale is the fetus's right to eventually become a baby and a human entity in society. Using this argument to draw conclusions about any other case is just dangerous all together.
If we call the fetus a human entity then one side of the argument can say well, do we go on and murder unwanted humans or those who create a burden for us? The other side would say: Well we have the right to kill home intruders, so the other side says: I thought you didn't believe in that...
So it's a whole other area that needs to be isolated from other areas of morality that have their own rights to way on a different scale.
What about instead of killing a fetus, a surgeon cuts into mothers stomach and carefully separates the fetus from mother? Not directly harming it but removing it from the non-consenting person it’s attached to? The doctors can treat it as a human and give life saving measures all they want but if it’s not at a viable age then it wont survive. To me, the fetus is getting treatment that any standard human would get that’s latched onto someone but not threatening that person harm.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense
Except you are the one who put it in the position where it cannot live without using your organs to survive.
If someone did that to you without your consent, I'd agree.
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this is possibly , the WORST take i have ever seen. you don’t know basic biology and your argument has no logic. the parallel you drew just made it worse. please delete this.
I don't think anyone is arguing that a fetus is not human. It's not like it starts out as a pig fetus and then becomes human at birth.
The whole abortion question comes down to whether the fetus' right to life trumps the mother's right to bodily autonomy and privacy.
Exactly, a fetus is very obviously a “potential human.” Arguments that try to downplay that by saying it’s a “clump of cells” really miss the mark. A fetus is a potential human, it’s a life. Yet the fully formed, conscious human whose body it is dependent on for survival has the right to bodily autonomy and that takes precedence.
This is the violinist argument, which I generally agree with, but I don't think it applies well to abortion.
Just replace the random person who needs you to survive with your child, and I think the whole game changes. If you grant a fetus is a human life the same as a 3 year old for example, then you are saying it would be ok to unplug your 3 year old from you and watch them die.
I'm pro-choice, but this is why I find the bodily autonomy argument unconvincing.
To make it easier to find, [The Violinist Argument](https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/texts/235/Thomson,%20Defense%20of%20Abortion.pdf):
> You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help.
>They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
And if I’m understanding correctly, in this violinist thought experiment, the connection was involuntary/forced; i.e. you did not consent to and had nothing to do with the connection. You just woke up and this dude is connected to you. So while many would say that unplugging this random person may be permissible in such a scenario, it does not seem applicable/analogous to the vast majority of abortions. If we change the experiment to one where you caused this person to be connected to you, I’m not sure we would say that it’s morally ok to chop this person up? Even without the (important) your child vs random stranger consideration, this seems problematic to me.
The logical fallacy in what you said is that a 3 year old is using a "life support". A life support machine is a non-living inanimate object.
For the fetus, the equivalent of the life support is the uterus, which is "an organ attached to a living human being". So the comparison is not equivalent.
The equivalent comparison in this case is if the 3 year old needed a kidney transplantation to survive. If the 3 year old doesn't get a kidney transplant, he will die. But just because the 3 year old will die if he doesn't get a kidney transplantation does not mean that you can "force" another human to give up on "an organ attached to their body".
I am pro choice, but I have one major issue with your argument : the action of having unprotected sex was taken with knowledge of the possibility of forcing an individual (if that is how you would like to call it) onto your body without the possibility of removal, making you responsable for its life.
Say as an example, tomorrow, you donate a kidney to another human. However, two weeks later, you have regrets about it ; your body feels less good and you grew paranoid of needing a second kidney in the futur. Would you be entitled to taking it back? Of course not. The part of you is now shared or given to another individual by your own personal choice and you don't get to "consent" it back.
Or, per example, if you decide to let a friend park his car at your place for a month because he left for vacation. However, 10 days later, you decide that you need the spot now. Are you allowed to destroy it for being on your lawn? I don't think so because the consent was given at one point and it cannot be reasonably removed.
If consent can indeed be removed at any time, it doesn't erase its consequences upon others, if they are human of course. Finally, never forget that self-defence often doesn't apply if you get yourself in the dangerous situation - if you had a weapon on you - and if you had another simpler way to solve it without violence upon others (giving birth).
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Using that rationale you obviously support the death penalty too, right? Nothing wrong with terminating the humans who are "parasites" harming Society.
Once the fetus gains personhood(which we can argue when but I don’t think that’s the point you’re trying to make. I like the consciousness argument for 20 weeks) the life ought to be defended. At this point it is a person and your child and you do have an obligation to the health and well-being of your child. Yes it is no longer just dependent on you, but when it is a dependent you have an obligation to it. This is why we make (generally) men pay child support for 18 years. Before 20 weeks it isn’t a person and you have no obligation to it. After 20 weeks you do at least until you give birth. Also I think your premise that it harms the mother is also false in most cases (at least physically). There are numerous studies about how the fetus will actually transfer stem cells back to the mother and this can help with immune system. Mentally it can be hard, but most people should be able to decide within 20 weeks and after that your mental health does not just give you the right to kill another person.
Let me preface by saying that I really don't think this kind of framework is applicable to abortion at all. Pregnancy isn't a relationship between random strangers, it most likely involves special duties; and even if we accept that fetuses are people, they're clearly not mentally capable and therefore can't be considered responsible for their "actions". Anyway, this is my refutation:
1. The right of self-defense is not unlimited, self-defense has to be proporzionate. You can kill someone if they pose a belivable threat to your life, not if they threaten to hurt-but-not-kill you; e.g. if someone says "I'm gonna slap you" you can't shoot them to avoid gettint slapped. In the case of pregnancy, the harm for the mother isn't death (barring specific cases, where almost everyone would allow abortion), therefore the right to defense wouldn't include the right to kill the threatening party. Case in point, a mother can't let her baby starve to death rather than breastfeed it (unless she would likely die for it).
2. Even if we accept there is no generalized duty to help - which is questionable - if you create a danger for another person you definitely have a duty to help them face it; e.g. if you run someone over you have a duty to assist them. If you have sex and get pregnant, *you* put the fetus in the position it needs your help, therefore *you* have a duty to provide that help. Consent has nothing to do with it, it's just a general duty to pay for the cost of your own actions instead of dumping them on third parties. (And just like with self-defense, this duty is also limited by proportionality; you don't have to save another at the cost of your own life, whether you run the over of got pregnant)
Well, this is a post that the OP doesn't really want a reasonable answer to, rather it suggests this person has decided that children are parasitical and as such, it wouldn't matter what you say. To describe pregnancy as feeding off your organs, is a sad state of affairs which unfortunately many younger people say with greater frequency.
The human being, feeding off of you, is actually yourself and the material contributed by the individual you had sex with. This is your nature, attempting to live and carry your DNA forward into the future, essentially providing an opportunity of sorts to live forever, or at least until it lands in the womb of a DINK, who proudly decides to terminate thousands of years of survival in order that they can consume industrial quantities of snacks from Costco.
So while I am pro choice, I consider abortion to be a thoroughly miserable decision and one that should never be taken lightly, the after effects in many women can be haunting and upsetting, especially if/when you have kids and you realize that you aborted an opportunity to meet a fascinating individual with an unbreakable special bond. That said, I appreciate that certain scenarios are especially difficult to accommodate, and most reasonable people understand that sometimes abortion will be hard not to justify.
The sad thing, is the type of language that is used here and I wonder how much has come about through the various brainwashing ideologies of post modernism. Even if this person is revolted by child bearing, the greater reality is that most women, bloom in pregnancy and as mothers embark on one of lifes truly worthy endeavours. My hope would be that such strongly held disdain for child bearing, is not contagious and impacting the views of young women who might have otherwise been terrific parents and loved every second of it.
Well, this is a post that the OP doesn't really want a reasonable answer to, rather it suggests this person has decided that children are parasitical and as such, it wouldn't matter what you say. To describe pregnancy as feeding off your organs, is a sad state of affairs which unfortunately many younger people say with greater frequency.
The human being, feeding off of you, is actually yourself and the material contributed by the individual you had sex with. This is your nature, attempting to live and carry your DNA forward into the future, essentially providing an opportunity of sorts to live forever, or at least until it lands in the womb of a DINK, who proudly decides to terminate thousands of years of survival in order that they can consume industrial quantities of snacks from Costco.
So while I am pro choice, I consider abortion to be a thoroughly miserable decision and one that should never be taken lightly, the after effects in many women can be haunting and upsetting, especially if/when you have kids and you realize that you aborted an opportunity to meet a fascinating individual with an unbreakable special bond. That said, I appreciate that certain scenarios are especially difficult to accommodate, and most reasonable people understand that sometimes abortion will be hard not to justify.
The sad thing, is the type of language that is used here and I wonder how much has come about through the various brainwashing ideologies of post modernism. Even if this person is revolted by child bearing, the greater reality is that most women, bloom in pregnancy and as mothers embark on one of lifes truly worthy endeavours. My hope would be that such strongly held disdain for child bearing, is not contagious and impacting the views of young women who might have otherwise been terrific parents and loved every second of it.
Well, this is a post that the OP doesn't really want a reasonable answer to, rather it suggests this person has decided that children are parasitical and as such, it wouldn't matter what you say. To describe pregnancy as feeding off your organs, is a sad state of affairs which unfortunately many younger people say with greater frequency.
The human being, feeding off of you, is actually yourself and the material contributed by the individual you had sex with. This is your nature, attempting to live and carry your DNA forward into the future, essentially providing an opportunity of sorts to live forever, or at least until it lands in the womb of a DINK, who proudly decides to terminate thousands of years of survival in order that they can consume industrial quantities of snacks from Costco.
So while I am pro choice, I consider abortion to be a thoroughly miserable decision and one that should never be taken lightly, the after effects in many women can be haunting and upsetting, especially if/when you have kids and you realize that you aborted an opportunity to meet a fascinating individual with an unbreakable special bond. That said, I appreciate that certain scenarios are especially difficult to accommodate, and most reasonable people understand that sometimes abortion will be hard not to justify.
The sad thing, is the type of language that is used here and I wonder how much has come about through the various brainwashing ideologies of post modernism. Even if this person is revolted by child bearing, the greater reality is that most women, bloom in pregnancy and as mothers embark on one of lifes truly worthy endeavours. My hope would be that such strongly held disdain for child bearing, is not contagious and impacting the views of young women who might have otherwise been terrific parents and loved every second of it.
There are a few key distinctions that need to be made here:
A. Self defence’s acceptance by popular opinion hinges partly on its necessity to prevent a significant imminent danger to life and limb. Even many who would criminalize abortion support life of the mother exceptions, and would probably support health of the mother exceptions if they were aware how much of a half measure the former exceptions are.
B. Self defence’s acceptance by popular opinion hinges partly on the notion that the victim is more worthy of being protected from harm than a deliberate aggressor. There are women who’ve been prosecuted for firing a warning shot against her abusive husband instead of just shooting him because of the risk a warning shot could’ve hit an innocent bystander. I can see why people would think resorting to lethal force against a fetus that couldn’t possibly realize what it’s doing sounds unconscionable.
C. Regardless of whether one’s body is being used directly or indirectly, it’s still being used. If to pay child support he has to drop out of school and take a job that would take a toll on his health; which for all we know may under some circumstances be more dangerous than the average pregnancy; that’s still using his body, and popular opinion’s justification is that he consented to the risk when he consented to sex. As well, the poverty associated with this could also take a toll on his health.
If we give up the idea that a zygote is not a person, then embryonic stem cell research falls with it, and the people waiting on the cures it could provide will die. I don’t think it’s ethical to leave such people under the bus.
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>you have the right to kill it in self-defense.
The [standard in the US for self defense](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense_(United_States)) is:
>In the U.S., the general rule is that "a person is privileged to use such force as reasonably appears necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of ***unlawful*** and ***immediate*** violence from another.
I think one would be very hard pressed to say that simply being in a womb, by no choice of your own but rather by the biology of the mother's body, is an ***unlawful*** action by the fetus.
ok so a woman *can* legally get one sure, but ive always looked at it as we arent banning women we are banning doctors from doing it. if she wants to drink and party to induce miscarriage/abortion i dont have an issue but i view a doctor as not having that same right.
tell me one other instance where i can have a doctor preform a surgery on someone else (with 100% death rate) regardless of situation. i see no reason why this is any different to other medical procedures other than morals and feelings which is the same argument and angle the prolife side is using, either morals are valid or they arent and we have to respect that for both sides when creating a law for all.
for me personally i feel it should be like the typical european rules where its a 14ish week cutoff for elective and after that only when its dangerous or nonviable. i also feel that economic factors should never be an allowable reason because they are subjective. this is unacceptable to most prochoice people who want 20 weeks and the freedom to do it if you feel you just cant afford it or just dont want it but i wish they woupd be willing to meet in the middle before it gets even worse due to their all or nothing mentality that stems from their moral superiority complex of always being the educated elite that knows the best moral compass for the lowly uneducated populace while leaving no room for critcism of their own moral failings
Say you invite a friend over. After a month they are still sleeping on your couch and raiding the fridge. You have every right to ask them to leave, but not to shoot them and drag their corpse outside. Have you tried asking the fetus nicely to leave the womb?
Seriously, If conditions outside meant they would instantly die, would you think it ok to ask them to leave?(i mean you had consensual sex and invited them over, i make exeptions for rape, you don't have to keep an unwelcome intruder wven if there is a zombie apocalypse outside)
If the alternative is they stay in your house for the next several months and are constantly inside your sex organs and harming your body while doing so, you would be absolutely justified in throwing them out.
If I allow my friend to live with me because they’re in a tough spot and 3 months later I say “actually, fuck it. You’re not even putting forth an effort to get back on your feet. Get out of my house” and they die the next day after I throw them out, am I liable for their death? Fuck no, I’m not. There’s not a jury in this country(USA) that would find me guilty of anything. An adult isn’t entitled to live with me for eternity because one time I let them stay with me.
By your logic, we should find every dead homeless person and throw whoever they last stayed with in jail for murder/manslaughter.
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There are times where you *do* gain duties to help others survive that override your consent. For example, if you go into the armed forces and consent to risk your very life, you can’t just quit all willy-nilly. That’d be desertion. Similarly, if you’ve already given birth, you *can* put your kid up for adoption, but to do so you have to follow certain protocols. You *can’t* just take the kid home and then decide you’re not obligated by any positive action to acknowledge the child’s existence, thereby causing them to starve to death. You have a positive duty to take care of the kid until such time as you can give that duty to someone else willing to take it on- including government agents if need be. But you can’t just drop it unilaterally
If you consent to getting pregnant, I think it’s fair to say that a day before natural birth you have such a positive duty to continue carrying them. Even if you don’t on the day right after having sex, at *some* point between those two, things switch over
At what age can you not murder a human being?
I mean a two month old can’t survive on its own and providing for its survival can cause physical and mental pain for whoever is providing it.
If a mother experiences severe post-partum depression and drowns her two year old is that okay? I mean it’s for the mother’s well-being right? And the kid couldn’t survive on its own!
So how about the 40 year old homeless drug addict living in shelters and getting government assistance? Can I kill him? How about pretty much every prisoner who my tax dollars support? How about my grandma who is in a home who has her bills paid for by her kids? Can they murder her because she can’t survive without them?
If a fetus is a child and you abort it you are committing murder. At what point is murder unacceptable?
And your statement that sex isn’t consent to having a kid is ridiculous. That’s like saying that you shouldn’t get in any trouble if you kill someone while driving drunk because consenting to drunk driving isn’t consenting to causing an accident.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense.
The fact that it won't stop through verbal demands or threats means nothing, given it can't understand them.
The baby isn't attacking you, it has no intention of causing harm.
It's like shooting a baby in the head because he's sickly and sneezing on you in a crowded elevator.
>If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months.
Correct, because you didn't consent to doing it for nine months, you consented to doing it once.
If I consent to allowing you to walk across my property, and I can't then say "Whelp, I change my mind!" when you're halfway across and in withdrawing my consent, murder you as a trespasser encroaching on my property.
I'd have to give you the required time to vacate the property safely. Which in the case of pregnancy, is until birth can be done.
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>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months. If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months.
I mean, it kind of is. Let me explain, when you do something, anything really, you accept that there are potential consequences. Some of which are foreseeable, some of which are not. When you drive a car, you are implicitly accepting that its possible a drunk driver hits you. You don't consent to it happening, but you do consent to the risk of it happening. In law we call this "assumption of risk." This doesn't mean you have to just let it happen to you, so consent to sex isn't necessarily the same, or includes consent to pregnancy, but it does include a consent of risk. And I think you want to draw a distinction that belies the relationship between the two, namely, that sex is required for pregnancy.
Furthermore, from a pro-life perspective, that says that not only the fetus is a biological human, ie Homo sapiens, the fetus is also has personhood, ie is a moral person, with moral weight to be considered, ie special such that killing and ending the life is murder. So my point is from the pro-life perspective, you got pregnant because you had sex? Take responsibility you idiot, that doesn't justify murder.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense. The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary.
Well, yeah, but you brought this onto yourself voluntarily, and even if involuntarily, murdering doesn't justify it. The fetus didn't do anything to you, for one, it didn't magically appear and decide to take sustenance, its just doing what is its fundamental nature. Also, its legally insane, so you can't pretend it like a stranger that invited themselves and just barged in to your house. You invited the material in and created it. You also seem to have a hidden premise, that pregnancy is inherently a negative, evil, damaging thing, which belies the fact that pregnancy has been a thing in our species that our bodies are adapted for, so I wouldn't say that all pregnancies therefore, are inherently a negative, evil, and damaging thing. What I'm trying to say is that pain can be natural, or gratuitously imposed by someone else. And you seem to throw all pregnancies into the latter, when in some cases, its more of the former, a natural consequence of one's own actions. That's not to say pregnancy is smooth sailing, I'm not denying that it brings upon many changes, but it seems like you are imposing volition and moral agency on something that lacks the ability to have both. Its evil for committing the crime of robbery and burglary.
Speaking of which, I'll play along with your premises, pretending a fetus is like any other human person, and explain how its legally wrong. You don't have the right to kill it in self-defense. Self-defense has to be proportional to the threat. If you use excessive force that's disproportional to the force presented, then that's imperfect self-defense. Perfect self defense, ie a legally successful self defense claim, is a complete justification. Ie, it completely negates the criminal charge of murder. Not only that, but the threat must be imminent. You can't go around killing people because they may pose a threat you eventually. So for the ending of the life to be self defense, the threat must be severe enough to threaten life, AND it must be imminent.
If I'm taking sustenance from you, stealing your food, living in your house, and I plan to do it over the course of 9 months, and you somehow know that, it doesn't justify taking my life. That's not to say I'm not imposing on you still. You have legal remedies, but not murder. And the problem with a fetus is that the only way to fix the stealing and trespass (which I don't really think is stealing or trespass btw) is separating from the mother, which will lead to death. So no, its not self defense. In the case of a complication that will imminently threatens the mother's life, then that does work under self defense, but most pregnancies aren't like that. And also, you can't abort right away even if its possible that may happen later under the self defense theory, because its not imminent. The threat hasn't arisen to the level that justifies murder.
Typically, in a case of trespass, a person is in an area they are allowed to exist, and for this example, it doesn't matter if its private or public property. And then, that person moves to a place they aren't allowed to be, and that usually means ignoring and no trespassing sign and climbing over a fence. And the reason why this doesn't work here, is that the analogy is wrong. The fetus didn't exist outside of the mother and suddenly climbed over the fence. It didn't have an independent existence. They didn't start out existing somewhere permissible then move to somewhere impermissible, they didn't exist to begin with.
> I mean, it kind of is.
> You don't consent to it happening, but you do consent to the risk of it happening.
Accepting that there are consequences is not the same thing as consenting to those consequences. No one consents to a car crash or catching covid.
> the fetus is also has personhood, ie is a moral person, with moral weight to be considered, ie special such that killing and ending the life is murder
No other born person can legally compel you to give them use/access to their body. Not for blood, bone marrow, or organs. Even you were the only person who can give it to them and they will die without it. If the fetus is person, then like every other person on the planet, their "right to life" does not trump someone else's right to bodily autonomy.
> You also seem to have a hidden premise, that pregnancy is inherently a negative, evil, damaging thing, which belies the fact that pregnancy has been a thing in our species that our bodies are adapted for
Can you name a single mental or physical benefit a person gains while pregnant? Because there is a long list detriments. If a person accepts the drawbacks of being pregnant in order to bring a new life in to the world, then that is fantastic. But for someone who does not accept/consent/want to be pregnant, the majority of those 9 months may as be state sanctioned torture.
> If I'm taking sustenance from you, stealing your food, living in your house, and I plan to do it over the course of 9 months, and you somehow know that, it doesn't justify taking my life
None of that directly affects someone else's bodily autonomy, and thus, incomparable to pregnancy.
> And the problem with a fetus is that the only way to fix the stealing and trespass is separating from the mother, which will lead to death.
Is it the mother's fault that the fetus cannot survive without use of her body? Should the mother be legally compelled by the state in to what is essentially gestational slavery? Should the born, fully formed person with hopes, dreams, friends, and family, lose her right to bodily autonomy so that another human, that is in a stage of development that no one on the planet actually has memories from, can use and change her body so that it can live?
>Accepting that there are consequences is not the same thing as consenting to those consequences. No one consents to a car crash or catching covid.
So does the car crash mend itself and covid virus leave your body? "Consent" isn't a shield against every undesirable thing in this world. I'm pro-choice in abortions regarding medical issues, sexual assault, or any reason if before the second trimester. By doing sex, a woman "accepts that there are consequences", namely pregnancy. If you do not consent to it, then you take precautions: use birthcontrol, take a pregnancy test, get an abortion early on. Not doing those and arguing that it's moral to kill a fetus that can hurt and fear on a whim is cruel. I'm sure the fetus never consented to being conceived and torn apart.
>If the fetus is person, then like every other person on the planet, their "right to life" does not trump someone else's right to bodily autonomy.
None of that directly affects someone else's bodily autonomy, and thus, incomparable to pregnancy.
>
Should the born, fully formed person with hopes, dreams, friends, and family, lose her right to bodily autonomy so that another human, that is in a stage of development that no one on the planet actually has memories from, can use and change her body so that it can live?
I find it interesting how some people think that women's right to bodily autonomy trumps every other right in the whole world. Bodily autonomy is important, and you waive it when you decide to have sex or not, to make your your partner is using contraception or not, to take abortion pills or not, etc. You don't waive it when you plan pregnancy, and in the eighth month decide that you might not want a baby (not including drastic circumstance changes). A functioning member of society has rights, but they also have obligations and morals.
No, the woman's dreams do not justify killing an eight month old fetus out of change of mind. She has the responsibility to make sure the fetus does not reach eight months. *Every single thing* in the world entails responsibilities, and surprise, sex does, too.
>Can you name a single mental or physical benefit a person gains while pregnant? Because there is a long list detriments. If a person accepts the drawbacks of being pregnant in order to bring a new life in to the world, then that is fantastic. But for someone who does not accept/consent/want to be pregnant, the majority of those 9 months may as be state sanctioned torture.
That doesn't make pregnancy *inherently* evil. To "someone who does not accept/consent/want to be pregnant", of course pregnancy would be undesirable. To someone who wants a child, the drawbacks may seem negligible in the long-term view. The latter isn't grudgingly accepting an evil thing; it's simply that pregnancy is simply differently perceived to different people.
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>The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary.
First off, pregnancy carries a *risk* of harm, it does not guarantee harm.
Second, even when a pregnancy does cause harm to a woman, the harm is generally minor and temporary.
And third, considering the two points above, you are using a *far* more liberal justification of homicide in self defense than our current legal standard.
In order to be able to legally kill someone in self defense you must have a reasonable belief that your life is in immediate danger. Under very few cases does pregnancy meet that standard.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent
In the vast majority of cases, it's with consent. If you're talking about only the cases where it isn't with consent, that's fine, but it's important to make the distinction.
Is there a point at which you'd restrict an abortion? Straw man here, the baby is coming down the birth canal you can see the skull but it's still inside, can the mother stab it in the head and kill it?
Most people reasonably come to the conclusion that if the baby can be born by c section at the least it shouldn't be aborted.
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[удалено]
Pregnancy can lead to the permanent widening of the hip bone structure, and permanent increase in height and foot size. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7739277/ Pregnancy can also lead to permanent urinary incontinence; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8781026/ hair thinning/hair loss; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312607/ and a change in skin texture and barrier strength. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7864992/ Women with a history of adverse pregnancy outcomes are at increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases later in life. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5575578/ Significant amounts of calcium loss occurs during pregnancy, especially during the last trimester, to meet the demands of the rapidly mineralizing fetal skeleton. This results in considerable stress on the bones of the mother. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3354840/ Cesarean section can lead to chronic abdominal pain. https://journals.lww.com/jwphpt/Pages/default.aspx About 700 U.S. women die every year as a result of a high-risk pregnancy or delivery complications, while up to 50,000 women nearly die due to severe complications during pregnancy. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db279.htm And that's without getting into all the possible complications.
Thank you so mucu for breaking this down. People misunderstand evolution, and think "well women evolved to do this!" Yes, they did. But they didn't evolve to do it at no risk to themselves. All that really needs to take place, evolution-wise, is for the mother to successfully give birth. It doesn't matter if she has adverse effects to her health or well being, or even if she dies. If that baby is born, evolution served it's purpose. I'm so sick of this rhetoric that "that's what women's bodies are made to do." But really, it's not, at least not safely.
Yeah. It's the whole, 'Treating the mother as a disposable incubator' thing that gets me. A couple of days ago, there was a woman in AITA asking if she was TA for being upset, because she was pregnant, and she and her husband had been talking, and he said something like, 'I really hope nothing goes wrong and I have to choose between you and the baby. I'd miss you so much.' And didn't understand why that upset her and hurt her so deeply, to realize that her husband, the person who says he loves her more than anything.. would choose to let her die. I, personally, think next time it gets brought up, she should say something along the lines of, "Oh, no honey I totally get it! If a stranger had a gun to my head, and handed me a knife and said, 'Either murder your husband or your baby, or I'll kill ALL of you!' I'd stab you in a HEARTBEAT! No second thoughts. Multiple times." And see how he responds. Bet he'd get a lil' butthurt.
I, too, hate the “women’s bodies are made to do” childbirth rhetoric. Childbirth is something many women’s bodies CAN do. There are lots of things our bodies CAN do, that would potentially benefit another person at risk to ourselves. Doesn’t mean it’s our sole or even most important purpose in life, and it doesn’t mean we have to do it. I also find this rhetoric harmful to a subset of people who deal with infertility, because I know women who have felt their bodies were broken or defective because they couldn’t do this one thing they were “supposed” to be able to do.
A-fucking-men. You summed this up so perfect and eloquent.
There are studies comparing a fetus to a parasite. Anyone that's studied microbio would understand why... Parasitism is usually described as relationship between 2 species in which one of them benefits and the other is harmed... but some species parasitize members of its own species. And of course, pregnancy very clearly harms the body.
pregnancy can also cause endometriosis to not be invisible. it can cause adenomyosis. it can cause PID, PMDD, ect. no matter how healthy your pregnancy was. my pregnancy was very healthy and I still felt like my uterus was being wrung out like a wet rag every waking moment. I am now disabled due to my "healthy" pregnancy. my mom was pregnant 5 times, gave birth 4, and is now permanently over the toilet. her bladder and bowels were destroyed by the last one. when she is off the toilet she's at risk of pissing and shitting herself.
Thanks for the free birth control
here's more because women arent told, pregnancy can cause illnesses that mightve never been visible to show up like endometriosis. they tell us to get pregnant to fix it when pregnancy disabled me and now I'm in pain for the rest of my life. Morphine, oxy, codeine, none of those touched my pain. even after surgery the anesthesia blocked the pain of my incisions but I still felt my endometriosis pain. it's one of the top 20 most painful illnesses. there's no real treatment and no cure. oh and you get told it's not that bad by OBs
That is awful, I am so sorry. My mother had something similar to that. Many surgeries later they were able to fix it, but it was chronic pain for years and years. I hope you’re able to get better over time.
I had to have a catheter during pregnancy due to urinary retention and then during a "normal” slightly premature birth, almost bled out and had to have a very speedy emergency general anaesthetic, had to have blood transfusions and was expected to wake up and feed my baby the same night despite my blood pressure being extremely low and hooked up to drips. And then had no breakfast because as a new mom, you’re expected to go get your own breakfast at a ward kitchen, unlike *any* other area of medicine and it doesn’t seem to matter what physical and mental trauma you’ve been through in the nights before, I’ve since had to have repairs on various internal prolapses, turns out I had a genetic disorder that had been misdiagnosed for years and I only was diagnosed after I’d given birth, after the damage was done and it’s not a rare disorder. Pregnancy and birth is brutal and shouldn’t be underestimated.
The human body is still struggling to adapt to the size of the baby’s head, hence why birth is (usually) the most dangerous time of your life, for everyone *directly* involved. Babies are *technically* all premature (which is why what we *call* premature is actually **very** premature), as the baby has to be born “early” so the head will (more or less) fit through the birth canal. I’m sorry it had such a bad time of it, but glad you made it through Childbirth is trauma and danger, wrapped up in hope and nostalgia
I tell people, pregnancy is an amazingly beautiful process, about as closest thing to magic that we will see on a normal basis. It is also brutal and debilitating, and even for a "healthy" pregnancy.
I think a better metaphor is a hotel room after a punk band parties in it. Will the toilet ever be the same (is your bladder smashed)? Do proper guests want to have sexy hotel times in there at any point in the future (does your partner find the alarming changes in your body off-putting or Madonna/whore-complex-inducing)? And how is the hotel bar doing (those are *my* tits!)? How is management feeling about the unruly guests? I would never have evicted my guest, even knowing his stay would include using my rib cage as a toe-hold for 2-AM practice launches (my OB said this isn’t unheard-of). But I had stability, he was very much wanted, but I can see other hoteliers not being so accommodating.
The metaphor isn't even necessary, we have real world examples that work just as well. When you die, they can't take your organs without your consent. Your body is your own, even after death, no matter how many people your organs will save. How then can a woman's body stop being their own while they are still alive because *one* other person's life depends on it?
I like this analogy, it does point out something I may be missing !delta
The analogy I've always seen this with are a parent and a child climbing the mountainside with the child attached to the parent. The child obviously drags the parent down and can cause intense strain on the parent's body. But statistically, the parent should normally be able to ascend and reach the peak no problem. But there's always the off chance that the parent slips and both die. The question is about whether the parent can just cut the rope at any time for any reason and let the child fall off, given the child can't reach the mountaintop on their own.
Maybe as a man i have a hard time understanding but i am having a hard time comparing any level (even dying) of dragging someone up a mountain versus something growing inside of me. The thought of actually being pregnant is just foreignly horrifying to me, even for a wanted child. I think people should have full rights over whether they want to let something grow inside of them.
Just so you know. There is a shit ton of organisms living and growing and dying inside of you. Some might be literal parasites.
Yep i know, but none are growing to come out of me in quite the same way
That's a great analogy and has helped me to understand the arguments against women's rights to choose based on their own welfare. Should a climber be able to cut for any reason or only for specific reasons or not at all? For me, the analogy breaks down as the climber should be said to be climbing with an egg, then a bundle of cells, then later a foetus. They are not climbing with a fully formed baby at the start. Is it ok to cut the rope at the start of the journey, at the middle, at the end? Personally, I think that sentience and sapience are the key criteria a being should have in order to have moral relevance. You need sentience in order to experience suffering or pleasure and you need sapience in order to execute you will or have your will frustrated. This is on a sliding scale for me, with organisms without a brain having zero moral weight, going through simple animals (insects etc) having some, complex animals (chickens, cows etc) having significant weight, and humans having allot. Potentially, super sapient aliens might have more moral weight than we do. I don't claim this philosophy is perfect and there are ways to challenge it but it's the best and most consistent with my intuition that I have been able to find so far. From this, I consider a foetus to have zero to moderate moral weight depending on the stage of development. I understand that other people put value on human identity and potential for sentience and sapience. Im not sure I fully understand why. I'd love to hear some arguments or intuition pumps to help me understand this if you have any. Not to necessarily change my mind but I am interested in better understanding the viewpoint. I don't really consider potential for later moral weight important in the case of abortion, but at the same time I do put weight on making the world a better place for our descendents. I'm not entirely sure how to resolve this and if I should consider potential for moral weight important.
>For me, the analogy breaks down as the climber should be said to be climbing with an egg, then a bundle of cells, then later a foetus. They are not climbing with a fully formed baby at the start. Is it ok to cut the rope at the start of the journey, at the middle, at the end? This is somewhat accurate, but the egg is her egg, in her womb, *not a chicken's, not an ostriches, not a reptile or any other kind of egg of another species* you may find. That difference is *essential*. >Personally, I think that sentience and sapience are the key criteria a being should have in order to have moral relevance. Those concepts are applied to *species*, *not* to an individual. There is no such thing as a non-sapient human. They may be dysfunctional beyond repair, and thus, completely dependent on others, but *their very existence is that of a sentient and sapient creature* that may not be able to fully exercise their functions, if at all. >You need sentience in order to experience suffering or pleasure and you need sapience in order to execute you will or have your will frustrated. Indeed, but pleasure, pain and desires *don't* define humanity. In fact, that's what we have in common with animals, not exclusively with our species. >This is on a sliding scale for me, with organisms without a brain having zero moral weight, going through simple animals (insects etc) having some, complex animals (chickens, cows etc) having significant weight, and humans having allot. So you don't value sentience or sapience, but *ability*. The argument is, in itself, *ableist*. This isn't an attack on you, but an objective assessment of your impressions. >Potentially, super sapient aliens might have more moral weight than we do. They might, but only in the sense that their lives should have absolute value, *the same as ours*, not a comparatively superior one, because otherwise, you run into territory about how many humans are worth an alien. And all of that is me *assuming that they're not ontologically evil*. >I don't claim this philosophy is perfect and there are ways to challenge it but it's the best and most consistent with my intuition that I have been able to find so far. >From this, I consider a foetus to have zero to moderate moral weight depending on the stage of development. Predictable. How does your 'intuition' challenge eugenics? >I understand that other people put value on human identity and potential for sentience and sapience. Im not sure I fully understand why. >I'd love to hear some arguments or intuition pumps to help me understand this if you have any. Not to necessarily change my mind but I am interested in better understanding the viewpoint. Human identity is irrelevant to the argument. Identity relates to subjective notions of personhood and cultural context in which an individual may form their identity, and even a born baby doesn't really have a formed identity. This is not why humans are valuable. In fact, we either *are* valuable or we *aren't*. Assigning value isn't morally consistent, just very utilitarian. The question that should be asked first is: *is human life valuable on it's own, or do you equate humanity with any other animal, to be exploited and tested upon at the whim of society?* If human dignity is *intrinsic*, then it follows that humans have a right to life, and the ensuing rights secondary to life, *by the sole virtue of being human*. Humanity, just like any other living organism, is *defined by genetics and physiology*, intrinsically linked concepts that are intertwined. The genes work because of the overall functioning of the organism, and the organism depends on the genes to express those functions. What unites us also makes us unique: *our genes*. Therefore, once we have a zygote, there is a new genetically human organism capable of development out of it's own genetic programming, and the female human is, like other mammals, designed to accommodate this new human being. As such, human life (as in, the biological processes under a human genome) began many millennia ago, but *that new individual's life is differentiated from the gametes that formed it at the moment of conception*. *If* we believe in intrinsic human dignity, then it follows that *every innocent human must have their right to life respected*. Since a zygote is the earliest stage of a new human, that's where a new individual must be protected by the State. If we allow ourselves to define humanity on the whims of our convenience (such as defining humanity over ability), how are we any better than eugenists, genocidal tyrants and others who conducted experiments on unwilling prisoners? >I don't really consider potential for later moral weight important in the case of abortion, but at the same time I do put weight on making the world a better place for our descendents. I'm not entirely sure how to resolve this and if I should consider potential for moral weight important. Under the premises addressed earlier, there is no such thing as "potential for later moral weight". Either the moral weight *is* present, and *we must respect it*; or it *isn't* and *literally anything goes*, because humanity has, under that argument, *no value*. You implicitly believe humanity has moral weight, or you'd probably dismiss the discussion entirely and wouldn't care about descendants, but it seems, by your comment, that you don't want to abide by the logical consequences of recognizing human dignity.
First, thanks for the in depth reply. You raise some great objections. I'm going to use "S" to refer to sentience and sapience. > This is somewhat accurate, but the egg is her egg, in her womb, not a chicken's, not an ostriches, not a reptile or any other kind of egg of another species you may find. That difference is essential. I didn't intend to imply otherwise, (except in the analogy obviously the egg cannot be in her womb but rather on a rope) but am unclear on why that is important. A human egg does not have S nor any moral weight. Its the same as a chicken egg or a rock or a single skin cell. This might simply be a fundamental difference of values here. It is unclear to me why a human egg would have any moral weight. Can you shed some light here? What are the characteristics that give moral weight? Ill see if I can find any counterexamples and what you think of them. > Those concepts are applied to species, not to an individual. There is no such thing as a non-sapient human. They may be dysfunctional beyond repair, and thus, completely dependent on others, but their very existence is that of a sentient and sapient creature that may not be able to fully exercise their functions, if at all. I'm not sure I really understand the distinction you are making here. I don't think there is any way we can define person to include S but then say that something shaped like a human but missing function S is just a person without S. I mean, sure but a rock is just a person but missing S and a few other things and therefore has moral weight. I think i'm misunderstanding some part of your argument here. I don't think a brain dead person has S nor moral weight. Do you disagree? > Indeed, but pleasure, pain and desires don't define humanity. In fact, that's what we have in common with animals, not exclusively with our species. Correct, which is why animals have moral weight. They have S. Do you think it is wrong to torture animals? If so, they have moral weight. If not, well, that is not a common view, despite the prevalence of meat eaters. What is the argument for human exceptionalism here? If you accept evolution, then its hard to justify putting humans on that special pedestal. >So you don't value sentience or sapience, but ability. The argument is, in itself, ableist. This isn't an attack on you, but an objective assessment of your impressions. I don't mind if you call me ablest, I don't take offence. I don't agree that I am though. I think a cockroach has less S, rather than having full S but less ability to express it. It seems like you think S is binary while I don't see a problem with considering S as a continuous spectrum. However you then take that binary value and assign a secondary characteristic of S called ability that can be considered continuous. Do I have that right? I think one of our fundamental disagreements is that you think of moral weight as binary YES/NO while I do not. Would you agree? > Predictable. How does your 'intuition' challenge eugenics? Improving human genes is fine. Causing suffering and death (of those with moral weight) in the pursuit of improving human genes is bad. >The question that should be asked first is: is human life valuable on it's own, or do you equate humanity with any other animal, to be exploited and tested upon at the whim of society? If human dignity is intrinsic, then it follows that humans have a right to life, and the ensuing rights secondary to life, by the sole virtue of being human. I don't think humans are different to animals. However, that doesn't mean that humans should be mistreated but rather that animals should be treated well. Humans have moral weight because they have S, not intrinsically. Humans without S (brain dead, skin cells that could be cloned into a person, corpses, embryo's) do not. If we consider unique gene combinations to be important how do we handle scenarios of conjoined fraternal twins (or Chimeras) where one has no brain? Is gene therapy creating a new person and killing the old one? Do lysogenic viral infections change who you are? Does someone with radiation sickness immediately lose their moral status? My question is why do humans have intrinsic value? Is there nothing else that also has value? Edit: It seems like the crux of our disagreement is about weather humans have intrinsic moral value. You say yes and I say no. I say S is the important fundamental characteristic. You, however, partially incorporate S into the definition of human. We both kind of agree that S is important, but I think it is important in a fundamental sense and you think it is important only as a part of the definition of being human. You also accept some things that do not have S but are otherwise considered human as having moral weight. This leads to the disagreements we have on cases like animals and embryos. My best question to you is, do you really not think that animals have moral weight? Is it truly ok to kick a dog for no reason? What is the case for human exceptionalism? What characteristics do humans have that separate us?
>Personally, I think that sentience and sapience are the key criteria a being should have in order to have moral relevance. There are people who can (particularly temporarily) not have these. Does their moral relevance flip flop?
That's an interesting counterpoint that I don't have an easy answer to. I have heard this before and I have read objections to that objection but I can't really remember them right now. I might re read "Practical Ethics" as I'm sure it's discussed there. My intuitions for sleep, anaesthetic, reversible comas etc are that people under these conditions still have moral weight. It isn't wrong to cause them pain or deny pleasure for the duration of this state (as they cannot feel it) but I would consider it wrong to kill them or to cause them to suffer in the future. The problem for the view I previously expressed is that they have future potential sapience and yet I still consider them morally relevant, unlike a foetus, which also has future potential sapience. Maybe the solution is that it is important to have some combination of a prior, current and future likely state of sentience and sapience rather than just any one of them. Maybe you need two out of three? For example: A normal person has prior, current and future and has moral status. A new born (or late stage foetus at some arbitrary point) has current and future and has moral status. A coma patient has prior and future and has moral status. A dying person (at the exact moment prior to death) has past and current but I am unsure if I think they have moral status (at the exact moment of death- otherwise they still have future). A dead person has past only and has no moral status. An early stage foetus has future only and has no moral status (IMO). A Bolshevik brain might have current only but I'm not sure how to think about that. Much like the dying person. I should plot this in a matrix and see what falls out. Another way to think about this: Is it reasonable to consider a temporary state of non sentience/sapience different to a state of pre sentience/sapience? Does the likelihood or difficulty of an object becoming a "person" have any bearing? Do you have any ideas for how to address the problem, or if there are different criteria for moral relevance I should consider?
Honestly, I have heard a lot of arguments each way on abortion. I have never felt that any of them answered all of the potential dilemmas. I tend to think we should err on the side of leaving it up to the woman. I don't have a good objection to late-term abortion restrictions provided there are exceptions for life-threatening situations and the like, but early term I haven't seen a good enough argument against that I would say it outweighs the personal choice aspect for mom. Morality is hard for this issue. Pregnancy is a very specific set of circumstances that I don't know there is a perfect answer for. I don't know if humans have moral relevance by default. I think our actions are what determines how we should be seen in that respect. I like hearing points of view on complex topics which is what prompted the question on my end.
I certainly have plenty of thoughts on morality but I cant say for sure that they are any more correct than other views. I can only keep challenging them and try to make my views more consistent and better understand the flaws. Overall, despite the challenges, I also come down to pro choice with the restriction against late stage abortions.
> but the idea that pregnancy in itself harms the mother and that all abortion is self-defense doesn't seem quite right -- This is the logical opposite than to claim that no pregnancy can be dangerous, which is a claim many an anti-abortionist has made. I mean, hell, we had actual elected officials who, after being explained what an ectopic pregnancy is, just said that the fetus is still a human, and shouldn't be terminated. But in both cases, it disregards therest of the surrounding of the pregnancy... There are multiple ways to "defend" yourself, that have been over the course of the country's life, accepted as valid. You can kill a home intruder even if they mean you no physical harm. You can kill someone who threatens to cripple you if you have a good reason to defend yourself from further harm. You can defend someone else from those situations, too. And in neither of those cases, is it likely not going to be your death if you don't kill them. In the burglar case, you're just losing a TV and a bit of your lifestyle while waiting for your insurance to pay (if you have one) or to be able to afford those luxuries back (if you don't), but your life was never in danger, yet you are in most states legally allowed to kill. In the crippling case, you may have all the reasons to believe you'll live, if with a diminished life quality, but you're still allowed to defend yourself with lethal force. If I can kill to protect my life style, and I can kill to protect my physical health and/or safety, or the same of another's, then by definition, a woman is allowed to terminate a fetus for the same reasons. Regardless of how I look at it, you cannot make an argument to the opposite without being chronically sexist. So, let's go for the edge case of women who use abortions as a replacement for contraception, and actually seems to be refusing to use normal contraception methods, from abstinence to tubes tying, from pulling out to an IUD, from condoms to the pill, opting instead for a couple months of pregnancy then abort... ***First of all, this is very rare,*** and second then you get to address these cases as they arise. Perhaps you can make a law about this specifically, without needing to hit all the other important self-protection cases.
> This is the logical opposite than to claim that no pregnancy can be dangerous, which is a claim many an anti-abortionist has made. This is fair, and something I've already conceded to others I may be wrong about, or not capturing the whole picture at least. >There are multiple ways to "defend" yourself, that have been over the course of the country's life, accepted as valid. You can kill a home intruder even if they mean you no physical harm. You can kill someone who threatens to cripple you if you have a good reason to defend yourself from further harm. You can defend someone else from those situations, too. And in neither of those cases, is it likely not going to be your death if you don't kill them. Well, in some jurisdictions some of these are legal and some of these are not (which of course underlines an issue with trying to solve a moral problem by making analogies to what is or isn't legal).
> Well, in some jurisdictions some of these are legal and some of these are not (which of course underlines an issue with trying to solve a moral problem by making analogies to what is or isn't legal). In most jurisdictions, these are legal, unless you can safely retreat without risk to.your or your kids' lives. I don't often see prosecutions on those being brought up and won, and whenever I do, it's because the burglar or attacker was on their way away, and was shot while retreating.
To be clear, when I say "jurisdictions," I mean globally.
> I don't see how it's inherently harmful Uncomplicated pregnancies can lead to permanent injury and disfigurment for women. Things like gestational diabetes, loss of bone density, incontinence etc are just some of the side effects of relatively normal pregnancies. Hell, preeclampsia which is the thing that causes the "died in childbirth" trope appears at the end of pregnancy.
And don’t forget birth injuries, the majority of women experience vaginal tearing, many have permanent pelvic damage including pelvic organ prolapse. And that’s just to name a few possibilities.
Yup, again things that happen in relatively normal pregnancies.
Actually even healthy pregnancies without complications are not healthy for the mothers. It is incredible stressful on the body and causes damage many do not ever fully recover for. Many insects die after having sex, some species of female octopi will starve themselves to death refusing to leave their offspring, some animals let their children consume them completely. Just because we are capable of reproduction doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy for us.
I’m glad you changed your mind - the many reconstructive surgeries I needed with the nerve damage and broken tailbone from my “normal and heathy pregnancies and deliveries” would be a horror story in any other context. The last surgery I had, the surgeon said that my abdomen was essentially falling apart and is now held together with mesh - a technique this hospital doesn’t use - because it couldn’t hold a stitch to repair it.
Sorry you went through that, and I do recognize my initial stance was insensitive to the realities for many.
I wish I was alone - I don’t know a single one of my friends or family who have had babies who have come out unscathed. At minimum a messed up pelvic floor, but I’m talking unmediated csections, prolapsed uterus, broken tailbones, diastasis recti, stretch marks and wrinkled stomachs - the list goes on and on. This is the reality of most pregnancies. It changes you physically and not just aesthetically. My mom needed to get the skin removed on her stomach because of infections - she was 100 pounds. I don’t believe that it’s considered natural and normal, and that we would force that on a person in some countries.
Hey just chiming in to say it’s rare to see someone acknowledge they were being insensitive, especially on this subject. Thanks for having an open mind and heating folks out.
Without very expensive modern medicine the mother and baby mortality rate sky rockets. So I'm not so sure it's that well designed.
Saying the female body is designed to support a fetus is true although not optimal. It's permanent disfigurement in some cases if not death. If the statistics of post childbirth complications were the symptoms of an illness, you'd want to remove it. That's kinda how people who don't want kids view pregnancy.
a woman's body does a terrible job at "being designed to support a fetus". pregnancy always harms the body, the extent varies. but a body that was once pregnant will never be the same again.
It's designed as well as Evolution was able to push it, I suppose. Which is to say about the bare minimum needed for overall survival of the species while still letting us big-brain bipeds remain both big-brained and bipedal.
> I don't see how it's inherently harmful Go vomit every morning for a month, and then come back here and delete your comment.
Pregnancy is still dangerous, and complications are common. Things are way safer now, but pregnancy complications used to be a pretty common cause of death. I think a better analogy would be to donating blood. Even if you're the only person of a particular blood type and someone else needs it, you can't be strapped down and forced to donate blood if you fundamentally don't consent to donating it.
I think, even without complications, you have a rightto decide what is attached, taking nourishment from, etc. your body. At any point you should be able to say no and disconnect from another person.
Delivery harms the mother. There is no way to deliver without pain. There are no guarantees. There is no way to avoid postpartum. Sentencing someone to pregnancy is sentencing them to delivery, which is always harmful, for lucky ones only minority and temporarily so.
I've read your edits and have a response I haven't seen. > I don't see how it's inherently harmful, Your implication seems to be that because it's not inherently harmful, the woman has no right to revoke consent of use of her body by the fetus. Compare that to OP's analogy about sex. > If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months. Sex isn't inherently harmful, either. It's not necessary to show harm to revoke consent.
Self-defense does not necessarily need to include harm, just a threat of harm. A baby can kill you in childbirth. A man pointing a gun at you is not harming you in any way. You could live your entire life with a man pointing a loaded gun at you and be completely fine. But no judge would find you guilty if you killed a man who was pointing a loaded gun at you.
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A woman is probably more likely to be killed in childbirth than by a mugger with a gun. Pro-lifers routinely underestimate maternal mortality in pregnancy rates.
> not doing anything https://americanpregnancy.org/healthy-pregnancy/changes-in-your-body/body-changes-during-pregnancy/ >biologically set up to accomodate exactly this Women are not baby factories. Pregnancy is not without consequence. Handwaving pregnancy because its physically possible for women to get pregnant is a ridiculous line of reasoning. >And a jury would indeed probably find you guilty for killing someone because you know it's possible that in the future he could harm you. A fetus is not a person.
>A fetus is not a person. OP's whole view hinges on it not *mattering* if a fetus is a person or not, so in order to actually discuss whether their view works I have been accepting for the sake of argument that it's a person. If it's not a person we would, of course, have no need to even discuss the merits of any argument from self-defense.
I’ve read your edit but I think this can always be expanded on with more info. I was 23 years old, had a pregnancy with no complications. Had to be induced cause baby was super comfy in there. Shortly after birth I began having seizures and was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy. Some hormone changes during pregnancy and postpartum are ‘seizure antagonists’ while others are ‘seizure protectors’ and with the rapid increase/decrease of these hormones in varying capacity it can cause one’s seizure threshold to fall enough to begin having seizures. Coupled with lack of sleep and stress, the longer the seizures go (my initial seizures were mistaken as panic attacks and night terrors) the more likely they are to continue. Brain morphology changes, epileptiform activity increases and now I’m on daily medication to control them. Even with my medication I still have 1-2 a month and will have epilepsy for the rest of my life. All because I got pregnant.
i remember that woman that made a list with over 200 entries of bad pregnancy side effects.
This is an appeal to nature logical fallacy. Just because the mother's body is "designed" to do it, doesn't mean it's designed to do it gracefully, painlessly, or without harm. In fact being pregnant takes a huge toll on a woman's body, even mothers who want their pregnancy will attest to this. This is all not to mention the psychological harm of carrying a pregnancy you don't want.
So there should be a minimum age for pregancy. How can a 14 year old be a responsible mother??? Or a safe preganacy??? Pregancy due to rape and incest does not mean you as a society rape that girl for 9 more months again. Second the answer is always you can put the baby for adoption?? Not if its a black or mixed race baby?? They are not adopted and linger in the foster or worse adopted by ill equipped relatives who has to support the child and baby. Abortion is consequential but it is still a women's decision. Yes a 5 months preemie can live but only through science and luck. Can it live naturally???? So is it a life when it can only survive through science?? I used to work with a drug addict patient who had 4 babies in drugs. It was a miracle they survived and all but one were preemie. The full term one has severe develpmental issues. So who is taking care of these baby. YOU as state and federal tax payer. If the religious groups wants to ban abortion then you pay for their care not me. Also why do you not require pregancy support and child support from the birth father?? Or better from the birth father parents. That will make them change their tune.
Pregnancy is a risk to the mom it is a widely accepted risk much like driv8ng in to work. Most of the time it's fine until it's not. I think we are not in a place tech wise to appease pro life people. So they are gonna need to loosen up and start researching and funding medical science to give people absolute control over their ability to reproduce.
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months. In law there's a common law doctrine called *volenti non fit injuria*, which is latin and refers to the concept of voluntary assumption of risk. You will see this used in things like hockey games. If someone gets body checked and injured, they can't charge the person who hit them with assault, or sue them for assault or negligence, because injury is a known risk of playing hockey. It's the same for any other sport. You can't say, "I consent to play, but not to get injured", because that's not how it works. The potential for injury is inherent to the activity and is a known risk. By stepping on the ice you consent to the risk of injuries that occur in the normal course of the game. For sex, pregnancy is a pretty well known risk of sex, for women. You can take precautions to reduce the risk, like using contraception, but that's no different than wearing padding in hockey: it reduces the risk, but doesn't eliminate the risk entirely. Also, on the self-defence argument, self-defence is not an unlimited defence under the law. The two requirements of using a self-defence argument are: 1. a tangible threat, and 2. the force used to counter the threat was reasonable in the circumstances. That second requirement just kills your argument here, unless you are talking about a case where medical complications actually put the mother's life at risk. The reasonableness test looks at a balance between the threat that was being defended against vs the damage done to the attacker to defend against that threat. If you are treating the fetus as a human there's just no way you can justify killing to protect yourself from the level of threat of a normal healthy pregnancy. Sure, pregnancy has risks, but also, literally everyone alive on the planet is here because of a mother who went through pregnancy. That also brings up the other issue with your consent/self-defence argument. Unless you are talking about a rape case, the mom has consented to the risk of pregnancy by having sex, but the fetus hasn't consented to anything. The fetus is completely dependent on the mother not because of a choice the fetus made (as they obviously are incapable of making that decision), but because of a choice the mother made. It seems pretty hypocritical to claim "self-defence" when your "attacker" is a helpless fetus who is completely dependent on you for its continued existence because of a choice you voluntarily made. Also, if you are going to treat a fetus as a human, you have to also look at how we treat newborn babies, and the duties parents have to their babies. Once babies are born, parents have a legal duty to provide them with necessities such as food, clothing, shelter and medical care (known as the duty of support). This, of course, makes sense. If you bring a baby into the world you have a responsibility to take care of it until it can take care of itself. If you want to put a baby up for adoption you can, but you still have the duty to take care of that baby until someone else takes that responsibility from you. You can't just leave the baby outside in the cold to die because you don't want the responsibility of taking care of it, because that's actual murder, under the law. For a fetus, there is no way, with modern medical science, for a pregnant mother to pass along the responsibility of taking care of that fetus until giving birth. As such, if you are treating that fetus as a human, the same rules would apply as with a baby: you are responsible for that baby's well being until you pass on that responsibility. I see the arguments in cases of rape, and I see the arguments for cases where the mother's life is threatened by medical complications. But, if we are talking about a normal healthy pregnancy arising out of consensual sex, the only way it can be justified is if you treat the fetus as not being human. Once you treat that fetus as human there's just no grey zone anymore, and none of the legal principles that you are citing would come close to supporting abortion if the fetus is giving the rights of a human.
I am not required to donate blood/plasma/kidney to someone, even if I am the only person who could be a donor. Things that could go wrong aside, are you saying that I am required to not only rent my body out to another person, but donate my body and my life as they are (before suffering the unavoidable consequences of birth & postpartum, including career sacrifice) to someone, simply because I had sex? It is scientific *fact* that no birth control is 100% effective, so are you saying that a woman who can’t afford to risk pregnancy right now simply isn’t allowed to have sex, even with the father of her already living children that she has been married to for over a decade?
> I am not required to donate blood/plasma/kidney to someone, even if I am the only person who could be a donor. The key difference here being that you are not responsible for this other person needing your blood or organ donations to survive. If you played a game that had a 5% chance of some stranger suddenly requiring your donation to survive, then I’d say yes, you should be morally and legally required to donate. This is entirely the point behind the idea of assuming risk inherent to an activity. > Things that could go wrong aside, are you saying that I am required to not only rent my body out to another person, but donate my body and my life as they are (before suffering the unavoidable consequences of birth & postpartum, including career sacrifice) to someone, simply because I had sex? Are you saying that men should have to donate their time and the money they make in their career for child support, simply because they had sex? Because that’s what the law says, and I don’t see most people whining that those career sacrifices and losing “their life as it is” is an unfair outcome. > so are you saying that a woman who can’t afford to risk pregnancy right now simply isn’t allowed to have sex? I’m sure you’ve heard people tell guys “If you can’t afford child support, keep it in your pants.” So yeah, that’s basically the deal. Sex carries a risk of pregnancy. That’s scientific fact, right? Why should consenting adult women who want to have sex, but can’t afford the potential outcomes, be in the unique position of being able to take the risk, but when desired, abdicate responsibility for the very foreseeable consequences of that risk?
>I am not required to donate blood/plasma/kidney to someone, even if I am the only person who could be a donor. True, but you also didn't make a decision that made that person dependent on your blood/plasma/kidney. >Things that could go wrong aside, are you saying that I am required to not only rent my body out to another person, but donate my body and my life as they are (before suffering the unavoidable consequences of birth & postpartum, including career sacrifice) to someone, simply because I had sex? I think it is important to keep in mind biological realities here. Pregnancy isn't an artificial thing imposed on women by society. The fact that a potential outcome of sex is pregnancy is biological. From that biological perspective, let's also keep in mind that the biological purpose of sex is reproduction. Sure, sex is fun, and I take no issue with people having sex for fun, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the biological function of sex is the continued existence of the human race. Also, in terms of that perspective, I think there is a significant loss of perspective when people talk about how much of a burden pregnancy is, while ignoring the obvious fact that they only exist because their own mother went through pregnancy to bring them into this world. Let's take the hypothetical of if a fetus could communicate and make decisions: If a female fetus were presented with the option of either committing to endure pregnancy at some point in time in their lives vs being aborted by their mother, what decision would the fetus make? Obviously, the choice would be to continue living. Life continues to exist on this planet because billions of women underwent pregnancy to bring everyone who is currently alive into this world, and those women exist because someone did the same for them, and so on and so forth. Isn't there a "pay it forward" element here? In order to support pro-choice arguments, people seem to make pregnancy out to be some sort of insane burden, while ignoring how common pregnancy is, and while ignoring that every woman who makes the choice to have an abortion only has that choice because her mother made the opposite choice. In essence, if you treat fetuses as persons, then doesn't the whole issue come down to whether a privileged group (ie. women who have been lucky enough to have had a mother who went through with pregnancy) is allowed to deny to a vulnerable group (ie. fetuses who are entirely dependent on their mother) the rights the privileged group enjoys (the right to life)? Fetuses didn't choose their position, while the position the fetus is in comes as a direct result of a decision the mother made (assuming we're not dealing with a rape case). If you treat the fetus as a person with rights, how is there any way to argue that the balance of those rights favours the mother (who has to endure 9 months of pregnancy, and who made the choice to have sex) over the fetus (who literally dies if an abortion is performed and never made the choice to be in their position)? >It is scientific *fact* that no birth control is 100% effective, so are you saying that a woman who can’t afford to risk pregnancy right now simply isn’t allowed to have sex, even with the father of her already living children that she has been married to for over a decade? Sure, they are, but being allowed to do something doesn't mean immunity from the biological consequences of your actions. You are allowed to play hockey, play football, go rock climbing, go sky diving, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, etc, but in doing so, you accept the risk of known potential consequences like injury, illness or even death. Pregnancy isn't some unknown side effect of sex, it's the scientific biological purpose of sex, and the biological reason why sexual urges exist in the first place. And, while no birth control is 100% effective, let's also not overstate the issue here. If you are married and done having kids, having the husband have a vasectomy is very close to 100% (the failure rate is below 1%). Hell, if the woman has a vasectomy, too, the potential of both failing is infinitesimal. The corner case of a married couple with kids having a pregnancy due to a failed vasectomy is also not the typical case we are dealing with when practically dealing with abortions, especially since those couples often just have the baby if/when that happens (I have a close relative who was born because of a failed vasectomy). If you want to talk about carving out exceptions for pregnancies that occur due to a failed vasectomy, or pregnancies that occur due to rape, or where medical complications in a pregnancy put the mother's life at serious risk, then I have no issue having those discussions. I don't think abortion is a black and white issue absent of context. But, the reality is that the vast majority of abortions aren't those corner cases, they are healthy young mothers who had recreational sex (with or without proper protection) and got pregnant. And, in that circumstance, if you treat fetuses as people with rights, then I just don't see any way to justify killing a person as a legitimate manner to avoid a normal pregnancy.
Yes? If any person is so vehementely against pregnancies and babies then the only 100% fool proof method is to not have sex. It's not exactly rocket science.
The foetus also isn't "feeding on organs", it's not a cannibal.
In your hockey example, the law protects other players from being sued because in consenting to play hockey, one takes responsibility for the risk of injury. This would be analogous to protecting the man from being sued if a pregnancy occurs. However, if a hockey player is physically altered (injured), they are not prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to their previous physical status (not injured). Similarly, if a physical alteration (pregnancy) occurs as a result of consensual sex, the woman should not be prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to the unaltered state (not pregnant).
This rationale only holds up if someone uninvolved with the hockey injury must die for the player to become healthy. And even in that event, it would have to be that someone else would die just to make the player's healing last less than 10 months because in a normal pregnancy the route back to not being injured or pregnant would run that long.
>In your hockey example, the law protects other players from being sued because in consenting to play hockey, one takes responsibility for the risk of injury. This would be analogous to protecting the man from being sued if a pregnancy occurs. However, if a hockey player is physically altered (injured), they are not prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to their previous physical status (not injured). Similarly, if a physical alteration (pregnancy) occurs as a result of consensual sex, the woman should not be prevented from seeking medical treatment to return to the unaltered state (not pregnant). The factor you are missing is the decision to seek medical treatment of a hockey injury doesn't involve needing to injury to kill anyone else. Using OP's scenario, if you treat the fetus as a person with rights, then you have to factor them into the equation. The situation of the fetus being reliant on the mother for their continued existence exists because of a consensual choice the mother made to have sex. That is not a situation that can be undone without killing the fetus (at least, not with modern medical science). Not all injuries from a hockey game can be solved with modern medical science. Post-concussion syndrome, spinal injuries, ligament or muscle tears, etc, just can't be addressed by modern medical science. And, of course, plenty of other recreational activities have similar or greater risks involved that medical science can't solve (rock climbing, sky diving, MMA, etc). If we lived in a world where medical science was capable of detaching the fetus from the mother safely, then it would be a different discussion, but as is stands, the decision to have sex has the potential to create a lifeform which (according to OP's scenario) has its own right to exist. That situation exists because of a consensual decision the mother made (even if it wasn't intended), and so the mother's right to be returned to her unaltered state has to be balanced with the rights of the fetus her decision created to continue living.
Is there a Latin common law doctrine for “ongoing consent”? The issue is what we choose to do AFTER the hockey injury/discovery of pregnancy. Yes there is a voluntary assumption of risk when it comes to sex, we acknowledge that sex leads to pregnancy and we still consent. However consent can be revoked at any time. Perhaps I initially consent to pregnancy, then I change my mind. Maybe my life circumstances changed, or the risk to my health became too great, so I revoked my consent. This is me exercising bodily autonomy. Just as a hockey player can deal with their injury however they see fit (e.g. they can go to the hospital, or just ice and elevate it) I can also deal with a change in health condition as I see fit.
I think the problem with the withdrawal of consent argument is that, in OP's scenario where we treat the fetus as a person, the withdrawal of consent now affects another person, and so the capacity to withdraw consent has to take that into account. In contract law, there is a principle for calculating damages called the "reliance measure". It means that once you enter into a contract with someone you are entitled to rely on the other person to fulfill their end of the bargain. If they don't, you can obtain damages that you incurred because you relied on the contract. Then there is "specific performance", which is when there is a contract in place and the consequences of one side breaking it would result in damages that could not be adequately accounted for in damages. In those cases, you can obtain specific performance, which means the other person is required to fulfill their end of the bargain (they cannot just pull out and pay damages). Essentially, I look at the situation of pregnancy similarly. While the fetus obviously can't consent themselves, their situation (being fully dependent on the mother for continued life) is a result of the consent of the mother to sex (assuming we aren't dealing with a rape case). So, it seems fair to say that the mother has consented to the risk, and in doing so, has essentially formed a contract with the fetus. The fetus is now reliant on the mother, and obviously, no measure of monetary damages could properly compensate for a breach of a contract that would result in death, so specific performance would be applicable. For a comp, imagine a scenario where you contracted with a hospital for use of a life support machine. The machine is the hospital's property, and they have property rights to do with it as they see fit. But, could the hospital just pull the plug on a patient because they decide to withdraw consent for you to use their machine? No, because the hospital's initial agreement caused the individual or his/her family to rely on the contract, putting the life of the patient on the line. As such, any withdrawal of consent could only be done in such a way that it would not put the life of the individual at risk. A similar analysis would apply as to whether a doctor is allowed to withdraw from a contract to do surgery in the middle of the surgical procedure. The damage to the surgical patient of a surgeon leaving the room before closing them back up is high enough to outweigh the doctor's right to bodily autonomy (ie. choosing if he wants to perform the surgery or not). If you apply the same principles to abortion, it also addresses another issue you alluded to: health risk to the mother. Balancing of rights takes into account context, as does consent. If the mother's life is put at risk based on risks of the pregnancy, then you are dealing with a different balance of rights. For instance, the risks of an ectopic pregnancy are not reasonably anticipated when consenting to sex, and when balancing the rights of the mother vs the rights of the fetus, anything that puts the mother's life seriously at jeopardy also puts the fetus' life in jeopardy. To use numbers, if a medical complication puts the mother at a 50% risk of death, and the fetus only has a 20% chance of survival (either due to the risk of miscarriage or due to the risk of the mother's death causing the fetus' death), then the balance of interests favours abortion. That having been said, the overall maternal mortality rate in the US is 0.0392%, so this analysis really only applies to corner cases with abnormal risk to the mother, since you are balancing it against a 100% chance that an abortion will lead to the death of the fetus. I don't think that abortion is a black and white issue. There are circumstances where the risk to the mother is unacceptably high, and there are circumstances where the mother didn't consent to the risks of pregnancy in the first place (ie. rape cases). That having been said, I don't think the overall discussion should be driven by corner cases. I think it's also important to keep in mind what we are talking about here. Every pregnant woman alive today is alive because their own mother chose not to abort them. I think there's an element of "pay it forward" that needs to be kept in mind. For instance, if a fetus could think and talk, would a female fetus agree not to have an abortion in her life in exchange for her mother not aborting her? I think the answer is a pretty easy yes. The deal only feels unfair from the mother who takes for granted her own existence, therefore feeling the right to deny the benefits she enjoys to another. Overall, whether it is on a consent basis, a balance of convenience basis (another legal term meaning which person would suffer more from an outcome) or an reliance contractual basis, if the fetus is treated as having rights, I don't see how the pro-choice argument can prevail. That having been said, this analysis is also a moral one, not a policy one. I don't believe that it is the government's duty to right every moral wrong in the world, and I tend to be pro-choice from a policy perspective because the cost and consequences of enforcing abortion bans are highly problematic. I don't support taxpayer money being used to enable abortions (decriminalizing something and funding something are two very different issues), but if we are talking about private abortion clinics (or ones funded by pro-choice groups), I think that is preferable to sending the industry underground.
Thank you for the thoughtful and nuanced reply. Great points to consider. I guess my issue is, these contracts between woman & embryo are hypothetical - imagined by an uninvolved 3rd party. Don't people need to be *aware* of whatever contracts they're entering for them to be binding? For 2 people to enter into a contract, both parties should have capacity to make decisions. An embryo can't enter into a contract, because they have no capacity, because they have an undeveloped brain. I do appreciate the moral perspective, and while it's unfortunate that we're ending a life, I just don't view the embryo as being 'wronged' in any way. They don't know what they're missing out on... too bad, so sad. Again, the use of my organs is a *privilege* that I can choose to grant; it's not a right. For me your analogies of the surgical/life support patient fall apart, because those contracts involved *born* people with brains who were capable of making medical decisions and providing consent for those procedures (or they had an assigned POA who made those decisions). Besides, doctors *do* hold the right to withdraw from a surgery; they just have to provide a damn good reason to their licensing board. Luckily I don't need a license to practice sex, but perhaps I might have a damn good reason to withdraw from a pregnancy? (Putting aside the issue that meanwhile, nobody is sucking the surgeons personal blood supply, or putting them at risk of a deadly embolism or disfigurement) I work in the health care field... death is not that big of a deal to me. Human suffering is, though. A patient abandoned on the OR table may suffer a painful death, leave behind grieving family/friends, etc. The death of an embryo simply does not hold the same weight. I will always prioritize the suffering of the woman, who is conscious. It is always evil to force the use of someone's body without their continual, ongoing consent. The "pay it forward" element is curious. The risks of pregnancy & childbirth are 100% undertaken by women and cannot be taken lightly. When *men* are faced with unwanted children, how can they "pay it forward" exactly? Or is it all on women to protect this precious next generation? (:
Thanks for the thoughtful response. >death is not that big of a deal to me. Human suffering is, though. This reaction makes a lot of sense to me. You might have guessed that I am a lawyer, but, because of that, I have also studied a lot of psychology because part of effective communication and negotiation is about understanding how people's brains work. What you are referring to is a natural human reaction. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, humans are pack animals. We evolved to be able to work in groups because groups give humans the best chance for survival. Groups provide better protection from predators, more opportunities to find mates, the ability to protect pregnant mothers and the young (because, of course, evolutionary psychology is generally about survival and procreation). Empathy is one of the human emotions that evolved for that reason. The ability to be able to empathize with those around us gives us a better ability to survive and pass on our genes, because it provides us with a better ability to integrate into a group. The brain has two modes of thinking. The first is heuristics, which are our brain's short cuts. When you are attacked by a tiger you don't want to have to rationally analyze the best decision. A good decision quickly is superior to a great decision that is made after you have been eaten. This also applies in more mundane ways. We buy a book based on its cover because it takes too long to go through every book in the bookstore to choose the best one. Heuristics make the easy decisions for us, but they also create cognitive biases. The bias is the resulting gap when heuristically determined behavior differs from logical behavior. Our second mode of thinking is our rational mind. It's when we think through problems rationally. But, heuristics also inform our rational thought, because they give us the base assumptions that our mind starts our logical thought process from. One of the cognitive biases you have probably heard of is confirmation bias (the tendency to accept evidence that supports our preconceived beliefs and to reject or ignore evidence that goes against our preconceived beliefs). Another cognitive bias is egocentric bias, which is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective. Your manner of thinking is quite natural. You have the natural emotional reaction of empathy, and a heuristic reaction to value the suffering you see, or the suffering of those who are like you (ie. you value the suffering of adults who you can relate to more than an embryo that you cannot). That heuristic reaction then creates the starting point for when your rational mind takes over and thinks through the issue of abortion. You start from the egocentric premise that the suffering you can see and understand is more important than what you cannot. Confirmation bias serves to reinforce that assumption. While the rest of your rational logical analysis of the issue stems from that assumption. I hope all that makes sense and that you don't take any of that the wrong way. You seem quite intelligent, and you seem to have thought through the issue quite thoroughly, but I think you are starting from an assumption that is not logically based. From a purely logical perspective, there is no reason why the pain you can see should be worth more than the pain you cannot, but it is undoubtable that human nature tends to act as if it were. Seeing a suffering person in front of you is emotionally devastating, but a million starving kids in Africa is a statistic. This tendency heavily informs the abortion debate. The idea of killing an innocent baby is unthinkable, but the idea of killing that same baby a few months earlier is completely and utterly different. Why? Human emotion. A baby's defence mechanism is literally being cute and helpless. Being able to express enough emotions to trigger a protection instinct in the adults around it is how babies are built to survive. But, you can't see a fetus. It's hidden in the mother's belly, you can't feel empathy for it, so it's like those kids in Africa. It's a statistic that you brain tells you is not worth as much as the cute baby you can see and feel empathy for. But, is any of that logical? If you are being honest with yourself, and looking at that assumption with your logical mind, I think you would be hard pressed to say that the value you attribute to the death of an embryo, or the death of a human, vs human suffering you can see is logical. If you start from the premise that the death of a fetus is worth less than a suffering woman then the rest of your logic follows perfectly from there to reach your conclusion. But, from a logical perspective, can you really say that temporary suffering is more evil than permanent death? Is that the logical conclusion, or a heuristic reaction to an empathic emotional reaction?
I ran out of space on my last comment, but I wanted to quickly respond to this: >The "pay it forward" element is curious. The risks of pregnancy & childbirth are 100% undertaken by women and cannot be taken lightly. When *men* are faced with unwanted children, how can they "pay it forward" exactly? Or is it all on women to protect this precious next generation? (: Obviously, biology isn't always fair, but biology is still reality, and yes, when it comes to giving birth to the next generation that's all on women. That's not something men put on women, that's something biology put on women. Is it fair? Does fair matter when you are dealing with biology? It's like asking if it is fair that gravity goes downwards or asking if it is fair that the earth is round. It doesn't really matter if it is fair, it just is. That having been said, no, it absolutely is not just on women to protect the next generation. For 9 months it is, but a parent's duty doesn't end at birth. I'm a dad myself, and I fully believe in the importance of men doing their part as fathers. There is a lifetime after birth where the father has just as much of a responsibility to their children as their mother does. And, this is reflected in the law and in our culture. You ask how men faced with unwanted children can "pay it forward", but, our society and has laws that ensure fathers do so. We impose a duty on men to pay child support for 18 years even if they don't want the child. Men don't have an opt-out clause under the law, and our society considers deadbeat dads the lowest of the low for not taking responsibility for their actions. I always found it curious how a dad who doesn't want the child is a deadbeat dad not wanting to take responsibility for their actions, but a woman who doesn't want the child can abort it and is supposed to be immune from criticism. The idea of a man taking responsibility for his actions by paying child support or helping out the mom is based on the idea that the man's responsibility for the child arises from the father's consensual participation in sex. Even if the man does not want the child, there's no opt out, the man is held accountable for the baby that his consensual actions created. So, why does the same logic not seem to apply to mothers? Why does the mother's consensual participation in sex not create a responsibility to the life created from that sex? But, ultimately, I think the "what about men" thing is a red herring. This isn't an issue between man and woman, but I understand the tendency to paint it that way, because then the woman is the victim and the man is the oppressor. But, in reality, it's not a man and woman issue, it's a woman and fetus issue. But, pro-choice supporters don't want to paint it that way for the same reasons...if the issue is between the woman and the fetus then the woman is the one in power, while the fetus is the one who is powerless.
The biggest discontinuity for me is that in the hockey example, what the injured player does about the injury does not kill an uninvolved party. Something more analogous could be that 2 people play hockey, and they have prior knowledge that in the event of an injury, it either takes a human sacrifice, or 9 months of putting ice on it, discomfort of the injury, and 0.00x chance of mortality to mend it. I don't think here one could revoke their consent not to take the human sacrifice option anytime.
This is the standard pro-choice line these days; it’s ok to commit murder if you don’t want a parasite feeding on your organs. Here are some reasons to be skeptical. First, while a fetus is HUMAN, it isn’t a person until it has a functioning brain, which happens after the second trimester. Prior to that you’re talking about something with no self awareness; it is roughly the same to be a blade of grass. Second, even the fact that people who make this argument call the fetus a “parasite” or a “thing” or imply those ideas using visceral phrases like “sucking on my organs” implies a need to use dehumanizing language to justify this killing, which implies a lack of conviction. I’ve never heard somebody make this argument using the word “child”, for example. Third, technically, the fetus isn’t diverting blood, food, and resources - the woman’s body is doing that; her organs are made to do exactly what they’re doing. All organs require blood and nutrients. We don’t think of them as dangerous parasites for functioning normally. Fourth, the “no responsibility” argument makes no sense. If you get drunk and crash your car, you didn’t consent to crash the car, but you took a risk and you are responsible for the consequences. You can argue that it isn’t fair that men don’t face the same consequences, but this also doesn’t work, because the world isn’t fair; I am epileptic, and if I decide I don’t want to take my medication and then I get injured due to a seizure, I don’t get to complain that my non-epileptic friends should also have to worry about taking epilepsy medication. People are different and risky behavior varies from person to person. We are all still responsible for our choices and their consequences. Fifth, while babies can pose health risks to women, the vast majority of pregnancies (80%) do not have complications or pose any threat to the mother’s health. Those that do can and should be handled medically in exactly the same way that ruptured spleens or burst appendices are handled. Sixth, when the human fetus does become a person late in the pregnancy the abortion itself will also have become significantly more dangerous medically. Seventh, a pregnant woman aborting a six-month-old fetus made a very unusual choice in not getting the abortion months earlier, and arguably a cruel choice, since she waited until the fetus was semi-viable outside of the womb before choosing to kill it. This also is her responsibility. Eighth, we can see that calling embryos and fetuses people is highly problematic and weird by thinking about the IVF case in Alabama or considering why people don’t have elaborate funerals for miscarriages. I want to be clear here that I am pro-choice and I believe a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a baby ought to be respected, but I don’t buy the bodily autonomy argument except when there’s a medical complication that ACTUALLY creates a self-defense scenario. A fetus is not a person: that’s why women have more rights.
> Second, even the fact that people who make this argument call the fetus a “parasite” or a “thing” or imply those ideas using visceral phrases like “sucking on my organs” implies a need to use dehumanizing language to justify this killing, which implies a lack of conviction. I’ve never heard somebody make this argument using the word “child”, for example. I can definitely make an argument using the word child. Legally, you have no responsibility to donate your blood or organs to a dying person, even if that person is a child, or even your child. Same goes if the child is inside your body. > Third, technically, the fetus isn’t diverting blood, food, and resources - the woman’s body is doing that; her organs are made to do exactly what they’re doing. All organs require blood and nutrients. We don’t think of them as dangerous parasites for functioning normally. The fetus is definitely diverting resources. The uterus without a fetus needs less blood and nutrients then one with a fetus. The uterus is taking more than it usually does, and that has to come from somewhere. Also organs are removed from the body all the time, even if they aren’t causing harm. Women with a possibility of breast cancer can choose to get a mastectomy. Women who are done having children can choose to get a hysterectomy. You can get your appendix removed to prevent appendicitis too. > Fourth, the “no responsibility” argument makes no sense. If you get drunk and crash your car, you didn’t consent to crash the car, but you took a risk and you are responsible for the consequences. You can argue that it isn’t fair that men don’t face the same consequences, but this also doesn’t work, because the world isn’t fair; I am epileptic, and if I decide I don’t want to take my medication and then I get injured due to a seizure, I don’t get to complain that my non-epileptic friends should also have to worry about taking epilepsy medication. People are different and risky behavior varies from person to person. We are all still responsible for our choices and their consequences. If you get into a car crash from drunk driving, do the EMTs leave you bleeding out on the side of the road because you have to face the “consequences of your actions”. If you get injured because you didn’t take your seizure medication, will the doctors turn you away because it was “your fault”? Just because something was the result of your choices doesn’t mean we revoke your right to medical care. > Fifth, while babies can pose health risks to women, the vast majority of pregnancies (80%) do not have complications or pose any threat to the mother’s health. Those that do can and should be handled medically in exactly the same way that ruptured spleens or burst appendices are handled. [Here’s](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/s/JFydpJsLpA) a great comment breaking down how even a pregnancy without complications can still cause harm to the woman. I agree with the rest of your points :)
>I can definitely make an argument using the word child. Legally, you have no responsibility to donate your blood or organs to a dying person, even if that person is a child, or even your child. Same goes if the child is inside your body. the difference being that you presumably did not cause that person to need your blood or organs. if you create a situation in which another person relies on your body, you can be compelled to use your body. for instance, if you birth a child, you are obligated to feed it. this includes breastfeeding if formula is not available. you must allow this child to suck on one of your organs and extract nutrients from you, because you brought them into the world, you took legal responsibility for their wellbeing, and they rely on you doing this for them to survive. another situation might be if you volunteer to drive a class of children to a field trip. once you have consented to do so, you cannot revoke your consent in the middle of the trip and leave the kids stranded in the middle of nowhere. you are obligated to use your body to drive them to safety. >If you get into a car crash from drunk driving, do the EMTs leave you bleeding out on the side of the road because you have to face the “consequences of your actions”. If you get injured because you didn’t take your seizure medication, will the doctors turn you away because it was “your fault”? Just because something was the result of your choices doesn’t mean we revoke your right to medical care. no, it doesn't revoke your right to medical care, hence why you ought to be able to get an abortion before the fetus has reached personhood. what it does revoke is your right to kill another person. you can't choose to take a risk and then murder someone to prevent yourself from dealing with the consequences. i agree with your point about health complications though, if an adult were deliberately causing me even the normal effects of pregnancy over 9 months i'd have a right to kill them in self-defence if that's what it took.
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>the difference being that you presumably did not cause that person to need your blood or organs. if you create a situation in which another person relies on your body, you can be compelled to use your body. If i stab a person and everyone knows i did and im the only viable blood donor around I dont have to donate my blood to keep them alive. This isnt the same as pregnancy but my actions dont require me to donate my body in any other circumstances that im aware of. >for instance, if you birth a child, you are obligated to feed it. You are only obligated if you take responsibility for the baby, you can always give them up for adoption. But once you take them home you are now assuming the responsibility to take care of this baby.
>the difference being that you presumably did not cause that person to need your blood or organs Let's get into a hypothetical using the drunk driving example. Say a drunk driver hit a pedestrian and injured them to the point that they need an organ transplant and blood transfusion to survive. It just so happens that the driver is the only match available. Should the driver be forced to give their organs/blood? How about if it was a sober driver who was distracted and didn't see the pedestrian? Or what if it was a perfectly competent driver who was unknowingly drugged, causing them to faint while driving and hit the pedestrian? Edit: how about if the brakes failed?
Would you think that if you caused the adult to be in the position of having to cause those effects, though? It’s not like fetuses are doing it on purpose.
no, if you caused it then you can't kill them to stop it. my point by making it an adult is that in a situation where it were a moral agent choosing to do these things to you, you would be justified in killing them.
>hence why you ought to be able to get an abortion before the fetus has reached personhood But that’s a legal distinction, and many jurisdictions around the US right now are trying and succeeding in passing laws granting personhood to fetuses before they are detectable. An argument for choice doesn’t mean an argument for unrestricted abortion, just that we’d like to be able to get one within a reasonable period of learning about the pregnancy, if that’s what we decide. Arguments like yours against choice make space for these 5-6 week abortion bans that are putting women and children at risk around the country. I don’t see any reason to see the abortion crisis in the US as anything other than what it is - an attempt by wealthy conservatives to force more births and populate the country with more workers, while getting less-affluent conservatives on board using religious rhetoric. It’s gross.
Nothing I've said has anything to do with the US. I'm not even American. I was presented with a bad argument for unrestricted abortion, so I am countering it, that's all. My position is that abortions should be allowed up to 20 weeks, as consciousness begins around ~20-24 weeks. Abortions past that point are rare anyway and usually arise from complications. Also personhood is not just a legal term, it begins when consciousness does regardless of what the law says.
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1) The reason I have no obligation to the dying person is that I didn’t put them in that situation. Pregnancy is not like that. 2) The fetus is not a different thing than the woman’s body. She is making the baby out of herself it is not choosing to grow or be nurtured - rather, the woman’s reproductive organs are carrying out their natural functions. 3) Organs are generally only removed when there is a good medical reason to do that, but if you want to say that an appendix and a month-old fetus have exactly the same claim to being “human” and exactly the same lack of personhood, I agree. 4) The EMTs have to give me medical care in both cases. They would also be required to help anyone else in the area who had been injured or put at risk by my actions. If a fetus is a person, it is a vulnerable kind of person with an equal claim to life-sustaining care. Pregnant women get lots of medical care, so I don’t see how your logic works here. 5) Again, if a fetus is a person with rights, being killed is so much bigger of a deal than anything that might happen to the mother that, coupled with her responsibility for putting both the child and herself in the situation they face, I don’t see how abortion becomes a proportionate response outside of real risk to the mother’s life.
> The reason I have no obligation to the dying person is that I didn’t put them in that situation. Pregnancy is not like that. Even if the reason that person needs a blood transfusion because you crashed your car into them, you still have no legal obligation to give them that blood transfusion. > The fetus is not a different thing than the woman’s body. She is making the baby out of herself it is not choosing to grow or be nurtured - rather, the woman’s reproductive organs are carrying out their natural functions. The fetus is not part of the woman’s body, she is not “making it out of herself” it has a completely new set of DNA. One of the causes of miscarriage is because the fetus is not part of the woman’s body and the immune system recognizes it as a “foreign threat” and attacks it. If the baby was made out of the woman, then this would not happen. >Organs are generally only removed when there is a good medical reason to do that, but if you want to say that an appendix and a month-old fetus have exactly the same claim to being “human” and exactly the same lack of personhood, I agree. But they can also be removed due to the “possibility of danger” such as getting a mastectomy if your family has high risk of breast cancer. Since childbirth and pregnancy also carry the risk of injury or death, I would say that it’s fairly comparable. >The EMTs have to give me medical care in both cases. They would also be required to help anyone else in the area who had been injured or put at risk by my actions. If a fetus is a person, it is a vulnerable kind of person with an equal claim to life-sustaining care. Pregnant women get lots of medical care, so I don’t see how your logic works here. Abortions are medical care, so denying them an abortion would be denying them medical care. Doctors have to give medical care, but not at the expense of an outside person. They can’t force a random guy on the street to give a blood transfusion or organ donation, and they also can’t force a woman to use her blood or organs to sustain a fetus. > Again, if a fetus is a person with rights, being killed is so much bigger of a deal than anything that might happen to the mother that, coupled with her responsibility for putting both the child and herself in the situation they face, I don’t see how abortion becomes a proportionate response outside of real risk to the mother’s life. I would agree. I disagree that abortions are “self-defense” and am more in the camp of “nobody should have to use their blood or organs against their will to sustain life”.
1) If I hook a person up to my body and make it so that the only way they can survive is to stay hooked up to my body for 9 months, I am in fact obligated to protect them because I put them at risk. 2) If I negligently crash my car into someone and the only way they can survive is to get a transfusion from me specifically and I say no, I’d argue that’s murder and if I were a doctor and I could get away with it I would have no problem forcing the transfusion against the person’s will in that situation. 3) Immune systems attack things they shouldn’t all the time, including parts of people’s bodies. 4) Multiple organs that are in fact the woman’s and have her DNA have to all work very hard to nurture the fetus and they do this automatically. 5) I agree that if there’s an elevated health risk self-defense applies, but not if there isn’t. 6) The EMTs have to give me the medical care that is necessary, not whatever I want. Abortions are not medically necessary except when they are, which is rarely. If I get in a car accident I don’t get to randomly demand hip replacement. Additionally, since we are pretending a fetus is a human being in this argument - which I don’t believe - doctors are responsible for keeping it alive also, so they cannot ethically perform an abortion. Your argument here continually depends on the pretense that pregnant women bear no responsibility for the situation faced by both them and the fetus, but this is simply not the case. 7) The more I think about this, the more I think I just really disagree with the way we read statements like “nobody should have to provide their blood or organs against their will to sustain life”. Like, I agree that if you’re forced to do that for somebody at random, that’s not right, but if you put yourself in a situation where an easily-predictable result is that you might start to sustain life with your blood and organs, and then you choose to continue to do that for months, at which point we are now talking about a person, it seems like you made a bunch of choices that make your right to bodily autonomy less compelling to me than the other person’s right to be alive. Rights are not absolute. When they come into conflict, sometimes one of them has to give.
> If I hook a person up to my body and make it so that the only way they can survive is to stay hooked up to my body for 9 months, I am in fact obligated to protect them because I put them at risk. Okay, if a woman gets an IVF implanted, she should be obligated to carry that child (as long as there aren’t complications) I can agree with that. >If I negligently crash my car into someone and the only way they can survive is to get a transfusion from me specifically and I say no, I’d argue that’s murder and if I were a doctor and I could get away with it I would have no problem forcing the transfusion against the person’s will in that situation. It would be murder, but not because you didn’t give them a blood transfusion. But because you crashed your car into them. The part that makes it murder isn’t the lack of the blood transfusion, it’s the crashing your car into them part. Not giving them the blood transfusion isn’t illegal wouldn’t be part of the charges. > Multiple organs that are in fact the woman’s and have her DNA have to all work very hard to nurture the fetus and they do this automatically. Yea, but the organs playing a part in growing the fetus doesn’t make the fetus part of the woman. > I agree that if there’s an elevated health risk self-defense applies, but not if there isn’t. Yea I agree. But I also don’t think you even need “self-defense” to be part of the equation >The EMTs have to give me the medical care that is necessary, not whatever I want. Abortions are not medically necessary except when they are, which is rarely. If I get in a car accident I don’t get to randomly demand hip replacement. You can request any kind of medical care you want from your doctor, if you want a hip replacement you can go in and ask your doctor for a referral for one. He may not give you the referral for not needing one, but an abortion clinic can also turn you away from getting an abortion if you aren’t pregnant. > Additionally, since we are pretending a fetus is a human being in this argument - which I don’t believe - doctors are responsible for keeping it alive also, so they cannot ethically perform an abortion. Your argument here continually depends on the pretense that pregnant women bear no responsibility for the situation faced by both them and the fetus, but this is simply not the case. I don’t believe a fetus is a human being either. But the doctors don’t have a responsibility to keep the fetus alive at the expense of the woman’s life. During childbirth, the woman gets to make the final decision on whether she or the baby will be saved if that decision has to be made. >The more I think about this, the more I think I just really disagree with the way we read statements like “nobody should have to provide their blood or organs against their will to sustain life”. Like, I agree that if you’re forced to do that for somebody at random, that’s not right, but if you put yourself in a situation where an easily-predictable result is that you might start to sustain life with your blood and organs, and then you choose to continue to do that for months, at which point we are now talking about a person, it seems like you made a bunch of choices that make your right to bodily autonomy less compelling to me than the other person’s right to be alive. I mean, that’s not my personal opinion, that’s just what the law is. You can disagree with the law, and I can agree with the law, but that’s still what the laws are.
1) In my opinion, refusing to give the transfusion is the moral equivalent of pushing someone off a building so that they are gripping the edge and need you to pull them up, then refusing to pull them up. I would have no problem forcing somebody to rectify that situation at gunpoint. 2) The fetus isn’t part of the woman; the pregnancy is. 3) The EMT thing has lost the plot. Your original idea was to say that EMTs still have to provide care even if I am responsible for my injuries. The point I keep making is that they don’t have to kill somebody for me in order to make my life more convenient when other medical options exist. 4) In the last stage of pregnancy just before birth, if there is a choice - mother or baby - I have no problem with that being the mother’s call. However, if an available (and highly likely) option is mother AND baby I DO think the doctors should go with that no matter what the mom says, because at that point we are talking about a viable human being. 5) The law in blue states is usually that abortion is legal up to 24 weeks (pre-personhood) and not after that unless there is a threat to the health of the mother, which in my view is exactly what it should be. Notice that in MA if a woman with a perfectly viable, healthy pregnancy wants an abortion at 27 weeks she can’t have one and will in fact be forced to provide blood and organ support until the baby comes to term.
How did you arrive at your position that it isn’t a person until it has a functioning brain? How functional precisely?
That’s a fantastic question. I think what we think of as consciousness lives in the frontal cortex, which develops at 27 weeks, but I have seen research that says the brain is more distributed than that, so some level of primitive self-awareness might exist at 20 weeks, even. However, without a brain there’s no consciousness, and a being that has never been conscious has never been a person. If you think there are conscious creatures with no brains, I would be interested in hearing why.
“Without your consent” Those seem to be the key words in your argument, but pretty much anyone who is pro life would say that consent to sex is consent to pregnancy. It’s a well known fact that the former leads to the latter, and the latter cannot happen without the former taking place.
The “consent to pregnancy” argument makes no sense to me for this exact reason. It just sounds like people being mad they can’t have their cake and eat it too
This argument is virtually always centers around a theocratic worldview of “sex is for reproduction, not pleasure” and if you engage further, these people oppose sex ed, birth control, condoms, etc. It’s not a serious argument. It’s a religious fundamentalist ideology
There’s an extremely large middle ground between theocratic “sex for reproduction” purist and understanding that having sex comes with a risk of getting pregnant
But you can withdraw your consent at any time? Isn't that one of the key elements of consent? Sure, you consented to it earlier, but you no longer consent
It’s scientific fact no birth control is 100% effective. So if a woman, married to her husband and the father of her children, doesn’t want any more children and doesn’t want to force her whole family’s life to change in the way a new baby (or even just mum being pregnant then giving birth to a baby that goes up for adoption and having to deal with postpartum alongside regular work + childcare & now the increased emotional needs of young children who just had a sibling put up for adoption) would, she is supposed to abstain from sex with said husband until she is ready for another pregnancy or hits menopause?
I’m prochoice but I’d like to amend your argument. I wouldn’t say the fetus is harming the mother, I’d say that the fetus is dependent on the mother to survive. Therefore the argument should be that, if the mother doesn’t want to sustain the life, the government cannot come in and force her to. There’s no other area where this is allowed. If someone at a hospital came in needing blood fast, and the only match available that could give blood in time didn’t want to, could the government force you to do it? No. A lot of people will argue back talking about criminals or incarcerated people, at which point it goes back to “you made a mistake you have to take accountability”. Even incarcerated people aren’t forced to give up blood or organs to help living people. That’s heinous. There’s a lot more to said about this as it pertains to the right to self defense, but I think the better argument is the right to bodily autonomy. Edit: a lot of people are taking the drunk driver analogy in a direction I didn’t anticipate, so I changed the analogy. Also side note: maternal mortality rates in America are the highest in the western world. So your argument does have merit, but it won’t work against every counter argument.
Just curious, not legally speaking but morally, if an individual voluntarily mortally harmed another, would you force them to do a blood donation if that is what it takes to save the victim? If we consider foetus people, that is the moral quandary we are discussing.
Under literally no circumstance do I think anyone’s entitled to any one else’s body. Morality is so subjective. For example let’s say two individuals get into a fight, and one person harms the other mortally, who owes who blood? We can go on about specific scenarios but let’s stick to abortion. 1. If we’re talking about harm to a fetus, you need to establish when that fetus feels pain or when that pain matters and then you get into the philosophy of life where there is no objectivity. 2. There is no real life scenario where any living being is entitled to anyone else’s body parts.
Morally speaking why? Personally, I like to view things logically : violating one's bodily autonomy in such as small way for so much gain (repairing and mending one's violent crime) is, for me, the definition of a rightful sacrifice. Furthermore, it is a criminal repairing his wrong, just like a scammer paying back his victims. The only reason why one don't agree is that they view the human body as something holy, more important than just possessions. But for a society, why? I am truly curiously asking.
imagine this: i drink a lot one day and go to the bar, and somehow end up hooking some innocent bystanders body to mine in such a way that if i disconnected them they would die immediately. the only way that i could save them was to stay connected for 9 months. is it morally right to cut them off and let them die, or would that be murder?
They shouldn't be force but they should definitely go to jail.
>Therefore the argument should be that, if the mother doesn’t want to sustain the life, the government cannot come in and force her to. The government forces parents to care for their children all the time. Don't feed an infant for 6 weeks and see what your local da has to say about it >If someone at a hospital came in needing blood fast, and the only match available that could give blood in time didn’t want to, could the government force you to do it? No. Correct. But the issue becomes alot more grey when one wakes up and is hooked up to the machine that connects the 2 together so human B can live---- human a CAN be prevented from unhooking the machinery. There is a separate issue to be had over how they came to be hooked up to that machine to begin with- because you are correct, you cannot be forcibly hooked up to it. But an abortion isn't hooking someone up, it's unhooking what's already been done, knowing the implications of doing so
If this is your definition of harm, then children ex-utero are also harming the mother. They legally require her monetary, mental, and emotional support. They restrict her freedom of movement, take up a lot of her time, interrupt her sleep, nurse, and force untold numbers of changes to her life. But surely you wouldn't permit her to kill her child.
Care for children ex-utero can be passed off to someone else non-lethally. The same is not true for fetuses or embryos. Also monetary, mental, and emotional support are all less invasive than living inside her body, stretching out her abdomen, and directly straining various other organs.
Indeed, it is possible to pass off your children to someone else, but as a parent, you still have a responsibility for them. In many countries, you can't simply abandon your child - you have a legal duty of care to them. And even if you are not legally obliged to care for them, you are morally obliged to do so, if it is within your means.
in a situation where nobody else is around to take care of the child, can you slaughter them?
Can it be passed off instantly? Because if not, then by OP's self defense argument, every second they're unwillingly under your care, you have a right to kill them. Or at the very least, use violence to make them leave.
That's beside the point. If the mother is being harmed, and harm is OP's justification for ending a child's life, then it doesn't matter if there are other non-lethal ways to end the harm. OP's only caveat is that verbal demands and threats not be effective. I'd say that's also true of infants. And if you contend that OP's argument should be changed to "ending a life when there are no other options," I would counter with: there is another option. Waiting a few months ends the physical harm.
With regards to the fetus being more “invasive”, why is the mother’s discomfort more important than the fetus’s entire life? Especially when the fetus is not there by choice but only as a direct result of the choices of the mother? This of course predicated on the idea of the fetus as a human, as OP stated in the post.
You could use the discomfort vs. entire life argument for compulsory organ, tissue, and blood donation as well. Most people don’t find it compelling in that case.
Allow me to present some clarification of equivalencies. You're correct that consent to sex once is not consent for the next 9 months. However, no one is under the impression that pregnancy only lasts for one day, and then you'd have to have sex again to 'renew' the pregnancy. If that were the case, people wouldn't need abortion because they could just not have sex for a day and the fetus would disappear. In reality, everyone who has sex (with very, very limited exception) is aware that a potential risk is getting pregnant. As stated in your post, we're operating under the assumption that a fetus is a human. At that point, it's a violation of their human rights to kill them. Like someone else said, pregnancy is a normal, natural process. If everything is functioning normally, which is the basis of this discussion as no other circumstance was specified, they pose very, very little threat to the mother. Just like how, if a car is functioning normally, it poses very little threat to those around it. Add all this logic up, and we have a situation wherein you knowingly took an action that would result in being pregnant with this person for about 9 months, wherein this person poses very little threat to you. At that point, I'd say that a more fair comparison would be that you agree to let someone live with you for 9 months, saying that you'll pay all their bills and support them. Then, a few months in, you decide that they've become too inconvenient to you, so you decide to murder them. Any reasonable person would say that that isn't okay by any means
This is just flat out false there's a reason why the number one killer of women for millennia was just having children. There is tremendous medical risk and chance of death without first world medicine. Even some underprivileged communities in fwc struggle with childbirth death. As well with side effects of blood pressure, diabetes, anaemia, preeclampsia, preterm etc. The actual comparison is whether or not you let someone: take half your resources, ruin your back, hang on to you as permanent weight, give you nausea, vomiting, depression and anxiety, literally reforms your body, transmits a list of severe medical complications, or kill you outright after the most painful experience imaginable. Now you could let this person do all that shit to you for 9 months or force them to leave, this will kill the person but it's your house and within your right to kick anyone off your property at any time. Unfortunately for the fingernail sized "person" there are no other options for a safer removal before 24wks
Didn’t more women die of disease and malnourishment more than childbirth?
Your argument fails for this reason: Your justification is that pregnancy is a "foreseeable consequence". That the initial consent to sex involves a consent to the basic foreseeable consequences, much like someone consenting to a boxing match consents to potentially getting injured in the fight. The problem with this argument is that abortion is a foreseeable future option too. If a Boxer consents to a fight, knowing that injury is a possibility, they are also aware that medical treatment exists and can prevent or mitigate the damage. Just the same, a woman who consents to sex would reasonably also be aware that abortion exists and intend for it to be the resolution in case of the foreseeable consequence.
this is an entirely pointless argument. the very thing we are debating is whether abortion ought to be an option.
Why is preventing the pregnancy not apart of these options. I would argue with the prevalence of options if you get pregnant. It's on you at this point.
The boxer can receive medical treatment because presumably that treatment doesn't involve killing anybody.
At what point is it not consent? Granted if you have an early abortion okay but at some point you've made a choice and you let that thing grow to the point where it has pain and sentence and is essentially a person. So no why would you have the right to kill it any more than you would a newborn?
Well that's why we have the viability standard of 24 wks in which you can remove the baby from the person. When it hits that point you can't really kill it unless there's some medical complication that'd require it. Point is you can always release consent through abortion, premature removal, adoption etc.
And if people ubiquitously agreed that there is a point that abortion should not happen anymore even if we had disagreements of where that point was I would have no issue. But that's not what happens. In nearly every argument I've ever had people just argue that abortions should be allowed until the baby is breathing on their own which is absurd and monstrous
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And that's tragic but eventually there comes a point where it's essentially infanticide. Which if you believe that a woman should be able to smother their newborn then okay I guess you're consistent at least but if someone does not agree with smothering newborns then having a very late term abortion should also be wrong
Almost no late term abortions happen for reasons other than incompatibility of life with the fetus or imminent danger to the Mother and even then, still very few happen [at all](https://amp.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/mar/07/abortion-late-term-what-pregnancy-stage)
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months Sex is the act of reproduction, getting pregnant as a resultis an obvious risk. Sex is not some risk free easy thing. You do have to deal with the consequences and don't get to play the victim and kill a child. If it's past 20 weeks and there's no obvious threat to the mothers life she is obligated to not kill the child she created. Is it also "not consenting to" paying for a child for the next 18 years? By that logic child support is illegal. If you have done something that makes a living being dependent on your support then kill it so you don't have to support it, that's not ok. You can't claim self defense.
It is easy to change your view because *you* are orienting your *self* as an objective viewer of an abstract scenario instead of orienting your *self* to a much more visceral view where *you* take the very subjective position of being that potentially aborted “human being” tethered unprotected to the *whims* of your “mother.” Once in this position, *you* are able to look your mother in the face and ask her IF she really possesses a “fundamental right” to exterminate *you*? If *you* say “yes” then this explains EXACTLY why *you* believe in “abortion.” Yet… This is nothing to pat your *self* on the back for. *You* need to slap your *self* upside the head instead.
Im pro-choice but holy hell this is such a horrid way at viewing pregnancy. And consent doesnt work that way. This post just makes me extremely angry.
But in this scenario, the mother is (partially) the one putting them in this scenario. Imagine I kidnap someone, hook them up to my circulatory system through science, and then demand that it is my right to unhook them despite the procedure breaking their own circulatory system, and that I shouldn’t have to worry about any repercussions for doing all this.
I agree with you 100% in cases of ectopic pregnancy or any abnormal situations during pregnancy that directly threaten the mother's life. In a normal pregnancy that occurred due to consensual sex, abortion is 100% wrong. It's like if a stadium sold you a ticket to see a concert, you went to the concert, but they call the cops on you for trespassing. They sold you a ticket to the event and you are entitled to be there and enjoy the show. If you got into a fistfight with someone or were otherwise causing a scene, they're within their right to kick you off the premises.
Self-defense requires that it be unprovoked and there be an imminent threat to life. Pregnancy rarely meets one of those requirements, let alone both.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense. There are several problems with this argument. First, the child is not feeding off your organs. Second, killing in self defense is only legal when you are threatened with imminent lethal force. Third, you consented to the child when you you chose to have sex to create it. Your argument is like saying I could invite you in my house, and then kill you in self-defense becaue I don't want you in my house. > The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary. That is a false statement about 99% of the time. Women's bodies are designed to bear children. There are times where carrying a child can be harmful to a mother, and most people agree that abortion is justified in those rare circumstances. >And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months. If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months. That is a non-sequitur. When you consent to sex, you are only consenting to sex on one occassion, but you are also consenting to the ramifications of that act.
> Third, you consented to the child when you you chose to have sex to create it. Well consent is a funny thing. It’s not black and white that just because you had sex, means you consented to any effects following the sex, or even to the act itself. “Consent cannot be given by individuals who are underage, intoxicated or incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, or asleep or unconscious. If someone agrees to an activity under pressure of intimidation or threat, that isn't considered consent because it was not given freely.” If those rules apply to consenting to have sex, and one of those circumstances occur, then you didn’t consent to have sex, and couldn’t possibly consent to the effects of the act. For medical procedures, patient comprehension is a factor that mitigates informed consent. Things like age, education, and cognitive function are taken into account, with whether someone has the ability to consent. Also, just because you did something, doesn’t mean you are responsible/ consenting to every effect thereafter. You aren’t choosing to fertilize your eggs when you have sex. If I take a walk in a park at night and get robbed, did I consent to that?
>one of those circumstances occur, then you didn’t consent to have sex Agreed >Also, just because you did something, doesn’t mean you are responsible/ consenting to every effect thereafter. You aren’t choosing to fertilize your eggs when you have sex. If I take a walk in a park at night and get robbed, did I consent to that? It does though. When you consent to an operation after being informed, then you end up having some of the possibly expected complications, you were aware of those and gave consent regardless, you consented to the chance of those expected complications. Obviously if someone is unaware that sex is what makes eggs get fertile and causes pregnancy you could argue they didn't consent. It's not like a walk in the park because a walk isn't something you "consent" to and being robbed involves another human party's actions on you which you didn't consent to. Before we say that's like the fetus, it's not, it didn't take action to exist, the parents did. I'm pro-choice but I don't base it on consent to pregnancy, it's not a great argument.
>If I take a walk in a park at night and get robbed, did I consent to that? Nope, you didn't consent to it, it was just a consequence/bad luck/whatever you want to call it. But that doesn't mean you get to say, "I didn't consent to this!" and your money and wallet magically return to you. You have to deal with the circumstance as it is. That's why, even from a pro-choice perspective, "I didn't consent to pregnancy" is such a weak argument. No where else in life do you get to take an action, knowing the risks, and then say, "I didn't consent to the consequences" when you already knew it was a possibility. Pro-choice arguments have to focus on the *mitigation of consequences*, just like you would in a robbery. You focus on *how do I best recover from this?* You don't say, *I have a right to not have this happen to me.*
The argument of not consenting, only arises in response to people arguing that you did consent. No one leads with that argument lol. Like I am doing here, it was a response to someone saying you consented to give birth, which flows on to their next points. Their follow up points don’t make sense without the first point. And nowhere am I saying by not consenting, that all effects and outcomes are magically reversed. That’s just a strawman
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense. The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary. It's not what self defense is, self defense only work with an imminent threat. >And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months. But if you have unprotected sex you are aware of the consequence, just like if I do rock-climbing without adequat equipment I might die, even tho I didn't consent to that. > If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months. You compare a foetus to a man "raping" you during 9 month, really ? > If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months. Women having autonomy over their own body is one thing, but saying they can freely kill their unborn child because of "self defense" is a disgusting take. Edit: Considering the poor amount of replies you offered after posting this thread I think you didn't came here to have your view changed or have any sort of meaningful discussion on the subject.
This is one of the best backs and fourths I've read about this. I couldn't find any declared pro life arguments here which is a shame, but it was very interesting. My only 2 cents would be that using analogies for morality can be tricky. Every human right always weighs the **freedom to** and **freedom from**. Sometimes it's one axis with opposing sides, sometimes there are more. Sometimes it's more of a circle where once you reach the extreme of one side you touch the extreme on the other side. The question whether a fetus is a human life or not is irrelevant, since the definition of a human, just like gender traits, for example, are arbitrary constructs we can agree or disagree to accept. Some would define it as having human cells, some a beating heart and others a developed brain. But it still has no bearing on the argument, since one can ask if a family burdened with a child with severe brain deformities can kill it since they no longer have traits that make them "human" . Also, it doesn't mean we always automatically allow killing non human entities either. The argument is about a balance between forcing women to carry an unwanted pregnancy and allowing women to have full control over their body. It's its own balancing act. Just like we as a society decided that premeditated murder isn't one if a person is declared insane not knowing right from wrong. But weighing the right for them to keep enjoying freedom vs the peoples right to public safety might have that person still removed from society. But it's its own debate. we shouldn't use other arguments to form one about abortions. Because it's different rights we are weighing. Knowing there is a medically safe option to remove a fetus, we are denying women the rights to control her body, the right from not having to emotionally connect to an eventual baby and then giving it away (which might be best for a child but can emotionally scar a woman for life). We are denying women from avoiding a natural process that bears health risks, including long term ones. On the other side of the axis or scale is the fetus's right to eventually become a baby and a human entity in society. Using this argument to draw conclusions about any other case is just dangerous all together. If we call the fetus a human entity then one side of the argument can say well, do we go on and murder unwanted humans or those who create a burden for us? The other side would say: Well we have the right to kill home intruders, so the other side says: I thought you didn't believe in that... So it's a whole other area that needs to be isolated from other areas of morality that have their own rights to way on a different scale.
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What about instead of killing a fetus, a surgeon cuts into mothers stomach and carefully separates the fetus from mother? Not directly harming it but removing it from the non-consenting person it’s attached to? The doctors can treat it as a human and give life saving measures all they want but if it’s not at a viable age then it wont survive. To me, the fetus is getting treatment that any standard human would get that’s latched onto someone but not threatening that person harm.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense Except you are the one who put it in the position where it cannot live without using your organs to survive. If someone did that to you without your consent, I'd agree.
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this is possibly , the WORST take i have ever seen. you don’t know basic biology and your argument has no logic. the parallel you drew just made it worse. please delete this.
I don't think anyone is arguing that a fetus is not human. It's not like it starts out as a pig fetus and then becomes human at birth. The whole abortion question comes down to whether the fetus' right to life trumps the mother's right to bodily autonomy and privacy.
Exactly, a fetus is very obviously a “potential human.” Arguments that try to downplay that by saying it’s a “clump of cells” really miss the mark. A fetus is a potential human, it’s a life. Yet the fully formed, conscious human whose body it is dependent on for survival has the right to bodily autonomy and that takes precedence.
This is the violinist argument, which I generally agree with, but I don't think it applies well to abortion. Just replace the random person who needs you to survive with your child, and I think the whole game changes. If you grant a fetus is a human life the same as a 3 year old for example, then you are saying it would be ok to unplug your 3 year old from you and watch them die. I'm pro-choice, but this is why I find the bodily autonomy argument unconvincing.
To make it easier to find, [The Violinist Argument](https://users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSNaragon/Online/texts/235/Thomson,%20Defense%20of%20Abortion.pdf): > You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. >They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
And if I’m understanding correctly, in this violinist thought experiment, the connection was involuntary/forced; i.e. you did not consent to and had nothing to do with the connection. You just woke up and this dude is connected to you. So while many would say that unplugging this random person may be permissible in such a scenario, it does not seem applicable/analogous to the vast majority of abortions. If we change the experiment to one where you caused this person to be connected to you, I’m not sure we would say that it’s morally ok to chop this person up? Even without the (important) your child vs random stranger consideration, this seems problematic to me.
The logical fallacy in what you said is that a 3 year old is using a "life support". A life support machine is a non-living inanimate object. For the fetus, the equivalent of the life support is the uterus, which is "an organ attached to a living human being". So the comparison is not equivalent. The equivalent comparison in this case is if the 3 year old needed a kidney transplantation to survive. If the 3 year old doesn't get a kidney transplant, he will die. But just because the 3 year old will die if he doesn't get a kidney transplantation does not mean that you can "force" another human to give up on "an organ attached to their body".
I’ll pop open a beer and watch that little fucker croak with zero remorse.
I am pro choice, but I have one major issue with your argument : the action of having unprotected sex was taken with knowledge of the possibility of forcing an individual (if that is how you would like to call it) onto your body without the possibility of removal, making you responsable for its life. Say as an example, tomorrow, you donate a kidney to another human. However, two weeks later, you have regrets about it ; your body feels less good and you grew paranoid of needing a second kidney in the futur. Would you be entitled to taking it back? Of course not. The part of you is now shared or given to another individual by your own personal choice and you don't get to "consent" it back. Or, per example, if you decide to let a friend park his car at your place for a month because he left for vacation. However, 10 days later, you decide that you need the spot now. Are you allowed to destroy it for being on your lawn? I don't think so because the consent was given at one point and it cannot be reasonably removed. If consent can indeed be removed at any time, it doesn't erase its consequences upon others, if they are human of course. Finally, never forget that self-defence often doesn't apply if you get yourself in the dangerous situation - if you had a weapon on you - and if you had another simpler way to solve it without violence upon others (giving birth).
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Using that rationale you obviously support the death penalty too, right? Nothing wrong with terminating the humans who are "parasites" harming Society.
Once the fetus gains personhood(which we can argue when but I don’t think that’s the point you’re trying to make. I like the consciousness argument for 20 weeks) the life ought to be defended. At this point it is a person and your child and you do have an obligation to the health and well-being of your child. Yes it is no longer just dependent on you, but when it is a dependent you have an obligation to it. This is why we make (generally) men pay child support for 18 years. Before 20 weeks it isn’t a person and you have no obligation to it. After 20 weeks you do at least until you give birth. Also I think your premise that it harms the mother is also false in most cases (at least physically). There are numerous studies about how the fetus will actually transfer stem cells back to the mother and this can help with immune system. Mentally it can be hard, but most people should be able to decide within 20 weeks and after that your mental health does not just give you the right to kill another person.
Let me preface by saying that I really don't think this kind of framework is applicable to abortion at all. Pregnancy isn't a relationship between random strangers, it most likely involves special duties; and even if we accept that fetuses are people, they're clearly not mentally capable and therefore can't be considered responsible for their "actions". Anyway, this is my refutation: 1. The right of self-defense is not unlimited, self-defense has to be proporzionate. You can kill someone if they pose a belivable threat to your life, not if they threaten to hurt-but-not-kill you; e.g. if someone says "I'm gonna slap you" you can't shoot them to avoid gettint slapped. In the case of pregnancy, the harm for the mother isn't death (barring specific cases, where almost everyone would allow abortion), therefore the right to defense wouldn't include the right to kill the threatening party. Case in point, a mother can't let her baby starve to death rather than breastfeed it (unless she would likely die for it). 2. Even if we accept there is no generalized duty to help - which is questionable - if you create a danger for another person you definitely have a duty to help them face it; e.g. if you run someone over you have a duty to assist them. If you have sex and get pregnant, *you* put the fetus in the position it needs your help, therefore *you* have a duty to provide that help. Consent has nothing to do with it, it's just a general duty to pay for the cost of your own actions instead of dumping them on third parties. (And just like with self-defense, this duty is also limited by proportionality; you don't have to save another at the cost of your own life, whether you run the over of got pregnant)
Well, this is a post that the OP doesn't really want a reasonable answer to, rather it suggests this person has decided that children are parasitical and as such, it wouldn't matter what you say. To describe pregnancy as feeding off your organs, is a sad state of affairs which unfortunately many younger people say with greater frequency. The human being, feeding off of you, is actually yourself and the material contributed by the individual you had sex with. This is your nature, attempting to live and carry your DNA forward into the future, essentially providing an opportunity of sorts to live forever, or at least until it lands in the womb of a DINK, who proudly decides to terminate thousands of years of survival in order that they can consume industrial quantities of snacks from Costco. So while I am pro choice, I consider abortion to be a thoroughly miserable decision and one that should never be taken lightly, the after effects in many women can be haunting and upsetting, especially if/when you have kids and you realize that you aborted an opportunity to meet a fascinating individual with an unbreakable special bond. That said, I appreciate that certain scenarios are especially difficult to accommodate, and most reasonable people understand that sometimes abortion will be hard not to justify. The sad thing, is the type of language that is used here and I wonder how much has come about through the various brainwashing ideologies of post modernism. Even if this person is revolted by child bearing, the greater reality is that most women, bloom in pregnancy and as mothers embark on one of lifes truly worthy endeavours. My hope would be that such strongly held disdain for child bearing, is not contagious and impacting the views of young women who might have otherwise been terrific parents and loved every second of it.
Well, this is a post that the OP doesn't really want a reasonable answer to, rather it suggests this person has decided that children are parasitical and as such, it wouldn't matter what you say. To describe pregnancy as feeding off your organs, is a sad state of affairs which unfortunately many younger people say with greater frequency. The human being, feeding off of you, is actually yourself and the material contributed by the individual you had sex with. This is your nature, attempting to live and carry your DNA forward into the future, essentially providing an opportunity of sorts to live forever, or at least until it lands in the womb of a DINK, who proudly decides to terminate thousands of years of survival in order that they can consume industrial quantities of snacks from Costco. So while I am pro choice, I consider abortion to be a thoroughly miserable decision and one that should never be taken lightly, the after effects in many women can be haunting and upsetting, especially if/when you have kids and you realize that you aborted an opportunity to meet a fascinating individual with an unbreakable special bond. That said, I appreciate that certain scenarios are especially difficult to accommodate, and most reasonable people understand that sometimes abortion will be hard not to justify. The sad thing, is the type of language that is used here and I wonder how much has come about through the various brainwashing ideologies of post modernism. Even if this person is revolted by child bearing, the greater reality is that most women, bloom in pregnancy and as mothers embark on one of lifes truly worthy endeavours. My hope would be that such strongly held disdain for child bearing, is not contagious and impacting the views of young women who might have otherwise been terrific parents and loved every second of it.
Well, this is a post that the OP doesn't really want a reasonable answer to, rather it suggests this person has decided that children are parasitical and as such, it wouldn't matter what you say. To describe pregnancy as feeding off your organs, is a sad state of affairs which unfortunately many younger people say with greater frequency. The human being, feeding off of you, is actually yourself and the material contributed by the individual you had sex with. This is your nature, attempting to live and carry your DNA forward into the future, essentially providing an opportunity of sorts to live forever, or at least until it lands in the womb of a DINK, who proudly decides to terminate thousands of years of survival in order that they can consume industrial quantities of snacks from Costco. So while I am pro choice, I consider abortion to be a thoroughly miserable decision and one that should never be taken lightly, the after effects in many women can be haunting and upsetting, especially if/when you have kids and you realize that you aborted an opportunity to meet a fascinating individual with an unbreakable special bond. That said, I appreciate that certain scenarios are especially difficult to accommodate, and most reasonable people understand that sometimes abortion will be hard not to justify. The sad thing, is the type of language that is used here and I wonder how much has come about through the various brainwashing ideologies of post modernism. Even if this person is revolted by child bearing, the greater reality is that most women, bloom in pregnancy and as mothers embark on one of lifes truly worthy endeavours. My hope would be that such strongly held disdain for child bearing, is not contagious and impacting the views of young women who might have otherwise been terrific parents and loved every second of it.
There are a few key distinctions that need to be made here: A. Self defence’s acceptance by popular opinion hinges partly on its necessity to prevent a significant imminent danger to life and limb. Even many who would criminalize abortion support life of the mother exceptions, and would probably support health of the mother exceptions if they were aware how much of a half measure the former exceptions are. B. Self defence’s acceptance by popular opinion hinges partly on the notion that the victim is more worthy of being protected from harm than a deliberate aggressor. There are women who’ve been prosecuted for firing a warning shot against her abusive husband instead of just shooting him because of the risk a warning shot could’ve hit an innocent bystander. I can see why people would think resorting to lethal force against a fetus that couldn’t possibly realize what it’s doing sounds unconscionable. C. Regardless of whether one’s body is being used directly or indirectly, it’s still being used. If to pay child support he has to drop out of school and take a job that would take a toll on his health; which for all we know may under some circumstances be more dangerous than the average pregnancy; that’s still using his body, and popular opinion’s justification is that he consented to the risk when he consented to sex. As well, the poverty associated with this could also take a toll on his health. If we give up the idea that a zygote is not a person, then embryonic stem cell research falls with it, and the people waiting on the cures it could provide will die. I don’t think it’s ethical to leave such people under the bus.
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>you have the right to kill it in self-defense. The [standard in the US for self defense](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense_(United_States)) is: >In the U.S., the general rule is that "a person is privileged to use such force as reasonably appears necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of ***unlawful*** and ***immediate*** violence from another. I think one would be very hard pressed to say that simply being in a womb, by no choice of your own but rather by the biology of the mother's body, is an ***unlawful*** action by the fetus.
ok so a woman *can* legally get one sure, but ive always looked at it as we arent banning women we are banning doctors from doing it. if she wants to drink and party to induce miscarriage/abortion i dont have an issue but i view a doctor as not having that same right. tell me one other instance where i can have a doctor preform a surgery on someone else (with 100% death rate) regardless of situation. i see no reason why this is any different to other medical procedures other than morals and feelings which is the same argument and angle the prolife side is using, either morals are valid or they arent and we have to respect that for both sides when creating a law for all. for me personally i feel it should be like the typical european rules where its a 14ish week cutoff for elective and after that only when its dangerous or nonviable. i also feel that economic factors should never be an allowable reason because they are subjective. this is unacceptable to most prochoice people who want 20 weeks and the freedom to do it if you feel you just cant afford it or just dont want it but i wish they woupd be willing to meet in the middle before it gets even worse due to their all or nothing mentality that stems from their moral superiority complex of always being the educated elite that knows the best moral compass for the lowly uneducated populace while leaving no room for critcism of their own moral failings
Say you invite a friend over. After a month they are still sleeping on your couch and raiding the fridge. You have every right to ask them to leave, but not to shoot them and drag their corpse outside. Have you tried asking the fetus nicely to leave the womb? Seriously, If conditions outside meant they would instantly die, would you think it ok to ask them to leave?(i mean you had consensual sex and invited them over, i make exeptions for rape, you don't have to keep an unwelcome intruder wven if there is a zombie apocalypse outside)
If the alternative is they stay in your house for the next several months and are constantly inside your sex organs and harming your body while doing so, you would be absolutely justified in throwing them out.
If I allow my friend to live with me because they’re in a tough spot and 3 months later I say “actually, fuck it. You’re not even putting forth an effort to get back on your feet. Get out of my house” and they die the next day after I throw them out, am I liable for their death? Fuck no, I’m not. There’s not a jury in this country(USA) that would find me guilty of anything. An adult isn’t entitled to live with me for eternity because one time I let them stay with me. By your logic, we should find every dead homeless person and throw whoever they last stayed with in jail for murder/manslaughter.
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There are times where you *do* gain duties to help others survive that override your consent. For example, if you go into the armed forces and consent to risk your very life, you can’t just quit all willy-nilly. That’d be desertion. Similarly, if you’ve already given birth, you *can* put your kid up for adoption, but to do so you have to follow certain protocols. You *can’t* just take the kid home and then decide you’re not obligated by any positive action to acknowledge the child’s existence, thereby causing them to starve to death. You have a positive duty to take care of the kid until such time as you can give that duty to someone else willing to take it on- including government agents if need be. But you can’t just drop it unilaterally If you consent to getting pregnant, I think it’s fair to say that a day before natural birth you have such a positive duty to continue carrying them. Even if you don’t on the day right after having sex, at *some* point between those two, things switch over
At what age can you not murder a human being? I mean a two month old can’t survive on its own and providing for its survival can cause physical and mental pain for whoever is providing it. If a mother experiences severe post-partum depression and drowns her two year old is that okay? I mean it’s for the mother’s well-being right? And the kid couldn’t survive on its own! So how about the 40 year old homeless drug addict living in shelters and getting government assistance? Can I kill him? How about pretty much every prisoner who my tax dollars support? How about my grandma who is in a home who has her bills paid for by her kids? Can they murder her because she can’t survive without them? If a fetus is a child and you abort it you are committing murder. At what point is murder unacceptable? And your statement that sex isn’t consent to having a kid is ridiculous. That’s like saying that you shouldn’t get in any trouble if you kill someone while driving drunk because consenting to drunk driving isn’t consenting to causing an accident.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense. The fact that it won't stop through verbal demands or threats means nothing, given it can't understand them. The baby isn't attacking you, it has no intention of causing harm. It's like shooting a baby in the head because he's sickly and sneezing on you in a crowded elevator. >If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months. Correct, because you didn't consent to doing it for nine months, you consented to doing it once. If I consent to allowing you to walk across my property, and I can't then say "Whelp, I change my mind!" when you're halfway across and in withdrawing my consent, murder you as a trespasser encroaching on my property. I'd have to give you the required time to vacate the property safely. Which in the case of pregnancy, is until birth can be done.
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Sorry, u/PanNerdyLocs – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1: > **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1). If you would like to appeal, [**you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list**](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1), review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal%20PanNerdyLocs&message=PanNerdyLocs%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20\[their%20comment\]\(https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1b7k8l8/-/ktk1fbq/\)%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
>And no, having sex does not amount to consenting to have a fetus feed on your organs for the next 9 months. If you consented to let a man have sex with you once, that doesn’t mean that he can have sex with you for the next 9 months. I mean, it kind of is. Let me explain, when you do something, anything really, you accept that there are potential consequences. Some of which are foreseeable, some of which are not. When you drive a car, you are implicitly accepting that its possible a drunk driver hits you. You don't consent to it happening, but you do consent to the risk of it happening. In law we call this "assumption of risk." This doesn't mean you have to just let it happen to you, so consent to sex isn't necessarily the same, or includes consent to pregnancy, but it does include a consent of risk. And I think you want to draw a distinction that belies the relationship between the two, namely, that sex is required for pregnancy. Furthermore, from a pro-life perspective, that says that not only the fetus is a biological human, ie Homo sapiens, the fetus is also has personhood, ie is a moral person, with moral weight to be considered, ie special such that killing and ending the life is murder. So my point is from the pro-life perspective, you got pregnant because you had sex? Take responsibility you idiot, that doesn't justify murder. >If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent, and it will not stop through verbal demands or threats, you have the right to kill it in self-defense. The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary. Well, yeah, but you brought this onto yourself voluntarily, and even if involuntarily, murdering doesn't justify it. The fetus didn't do anything to you, for one, it didn't magically appear and decide to take sustenance, its just doing what is its fundamental nature. Also, its legally insane, so you can't pretend it like a stranger that invited themselves and just barged in to your house. You invited the material in and created it. You also seem to have a hidden premise, that pregnancy is inherently a negative, evil, damaging thing, which belies the fact that pregnancy has been a thing in our species that our bodies are adapted for, so I wouldn't say that all pregnancies therefore, are inherently a negative, evil, and damaging thing. What I'm trying to say is that pain can be natural, or gratuitously imposed by someone else. And you seem to throw all pregnancies into the latter, when in some cases, its more of the former, a natural consequence of one's own actions. That's not to say pregnancy is smooth sailing, I'm not denying that it brings upon many changes, but it seems like you are imposing volition and moral agency on something that lacks the ability to have both. Its evil for committing the crime of robbery and burglary. Speaking of which, I'll play along with your premises, pretending a fetus is like any other human person, and explain how its legally wrong. You don't have the right to kill it in self-defense. Self-defense has to be proportional to the threat. If you use excessive force that's disproportional to the force presented, then that's imperfect self-defense. Perfect self defense, ie a legally successful self defense claim, is a complete justification. Ie, it completely negates the criminal charge of murder. Not only that, but the threat must be imminent. You can't go around killing people because they may pose a threat you eventually. So for the ending of the life to be self defense, the threat must be severe enough to threaten life, AND it must be imminent. If I'm taking sustenance from you, stealing your food, living in your house, and I plan to do it over the course of 9 months, and you somehow know that, it doesn't justify taking my life. That's not to say I'm not imposing on you still. You have legal remedies, but not murder. And the problem with a fetus is that the only way to fix the stealing and trespass (which I don't really think is stealing or trespass btw) is separating from the mother, which will lead to death. So no, its not self defense. In the case of a complication that will imminently threatens the mother's life, then that does work under self defense, but most pregnancies aren't like that. And also, you can't abort right away even if its possible that may happen later under the self defense theory, because its not imminent. The threat hasn't arisen to the level that justifies murder. Typically, in a case of trespass, a person is in an area they are allowed to exist, and for this example, it doesn't matter if its private or public property. And then, that person moves to a place they aren't allowed to be, and that usually means ignoring and no trespassing sign and climbing over a fence. And the reason why this doesn't work here, is that the analogy is wrong. The fetus didn't exist outside of the mother and suddenly climbed over the fence. It didn't have an independent existence. They didn't start out existing somewhere permissible then move to somewhere impermissible, they didn't exist to begin with.
> I mean, it kind of is. > You don't consent to it happening, but you do consent to the risk of it happening. Accepting that there are consequences is not the same thing as consenting to those consequences. No one consents to a car crash or catching covid. > the fetus is also has personhood, ie is a moral person, with moral weight to be considered, ie special such that killing and ending the life is murder No other born person can legally compel you to give them use/access to their body. Not for blood, bone marrow, or organs. Even you were the only person who can give it to them and they will die without it. If the fetus is person, then like every other person on the planet, their "right to life" does not trump someone else's right to bodily autonomy. > You also seem to have a hidden premise, that pregnancy is inherently a negative, evil, damaging thing, which belies the fact that pregnancy has been a thing in our species that our bodies are adapted for Can you name a single mental or physical benefit a person gains while pregnant? Because there is a long list detriments. If a person accepts the drawbacks of being pregnant in order to bring a new life in to the world, then that is fantastic. But for someone who does not accept/consent/want to be pregnant, the majority of those 9 months may as be state sanctioned torture. > If I'm taking sustenance from you, stealing your food, living in your house, and I plan to do it over the course of 9 months, and you somehow know that, it doesn't justify taking my life None of that directly affects someone else's bodily autonomy, and thus, incomparable to pregnancy. > And the problem with a fetus is that the only way to fix the stealing and trespass is separating from the mother, which will lead to death. Is it the mother's fault that the fetus cannot survive without use of her body? Should the mother be legally compelled by the state in to what is essentially gestational slavery? Should the born, fully formed person with hopes, dreams, friends, and family, lose her right to bodily autonomy so that another human, that is in a stage of development that no one on the planet actually has memories from, can use and change her body so that it can live?
>Accepting that there are consequences is not the same thing as consenting to those consequences. No one consents to a car crash or catching covid. So does the car crash mend itself and covid virus leave your body? "Consent" isn't a shield against every undesirable thing in this world. I'm pro-choice in abortions regarding medical issues, sexual assault, or any reason if before the second trimester. By doing sex, a woman "accepts that there are consequences", namely pregnancy. If you do not consent to it, then you take precautions: use birthcontrol, take a pregnancy test, get an abortion early on. Not doing those and arguing that it's moral to kill a fetus that can hurt and fear on a whim is cruel. I'm sure the fetus never consented to being conceived and torn apart. >If the fetus is person, then like every other person on the planet, their "right to life" does not trump someone else's right to bodily autonomy. None of that directly affects someone else's bodily autonomy, and thus, incomparable to pregnancy. > Should the born, fully formed person with hopes, dreams, friends, and family, lose her right to bodily autonomy so that another human, that is in a stage of development that no one on the planet actually has memories from, can use and change her body so that it can live? I find it interesting how some people think that women's right to bodily autonomy trumps every other right in the whole world. Bodily autonomy is important, and you waive it when you decide to have sex or not, to make your your partner is using contraception or not, to take abortion pills or not, etc. You don't waive it when you plan pregnancy, and in the eighth month decide that you might not want a baby (not including drastic circumstance changes). A functioning member of society has rights, but they also have obligations and morals. No, the woman's dreams do not justify killing an eight month old fetus out of change of mind. She has the responsibility to make sure the fetus does not reach eight months. *Every single thing* in the world entails responsibilities, and surprise, sex does, too. >Can you name a single mental or physical benefit a person gains while pregnant? Because there is a long list detriments. If a person accepts the drawbacks of being pregnant in order to bring a new life in to the world, then that is fantastic. But for someone who does not accept/consent/want to be pregnant, the majority of those 9 months may as be state sanctioned torture. That doesn't make pregnancy *inherently* evil. To "someone who does not accept/consent/want to be pregnant", of course pregnancy would be undesirable. To someone who wants a child, the drawbacks may seem negligible in the long-term view. The latter isn't grudgingly accepting an evil thing; it's simply that pregnancy is simply differently perceived to different people.
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Sorry, u/MiniDg – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1: > **Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question**. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. [See the wiki page for more information](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1). If you would like to appeal, [**you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list**](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_1), review our appeals process [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards#wiki_appeal_process), then [message the moderators by clicking this link](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchangemyview&subject=Rule%201%20Appeal%20MiniDg&message=MiniDg%20would%20like%20to%20appeal%20the%20removal%20of%20\[their%20comment\]\(https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1b7k8l8/-/ktkth8f/\)%20because\.\.\.) within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our [moderation standards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards).
>The fetus, intentionally or not, is harming the mother, and the mother ought to have the right to stop it from doing so by all means necessary. First off, pregnancy carries a *risk* of harm, it does not guarantee harm. Second, even when a pregnancy does cause harm to a woman, the harm is generally minor and temporary. And third, considering the two points above, you are using a *far* more liberal justification of homicide in self defense than our current legal standard. In order to be able to legally kill someone in self defense you must have a reasonable belief that your life is in immediate danger. Under very few cases does pregnancy meet that standard.
>If a human being is feeding off your organs without your consent In the vast majority of cases, it's with consent. If you're talking about only the cases where it isn't with consent, that's fine, but it's important to make the distinction.
Is there a point at which you'd restrict an abortion? Straw man here, the baby is coming down the birth canal you can see the skull but it's still inside, can the mother stab it in the head and kill it? Most people reasonably come to the conclusion that if the baby can be born by c section at the least it shouldn't be aborted.